A friend just applied in Foxboro. He took the class a week before Christmas and filed his application Dec. 19. He was told that he would need to talk to the COP. A week later, the COP calls to tell him that he has to come in, and schedules a meeting at 5 PM on Jan 6th. Yesterday, my friend gets a call from the COP asking if he can brings copies of his paperwork when he comes in...because they lost his application.
Fortunately, my friend did keep copies of everything(I'm surprised they didn't want originals). Anyway, he goes in for his interview, and the COP tells him that they only issue restricted permits, but that if my friend comes back in a year, hasn't gotten into trouble, and provides "sufficient" logs of range time, then he can be upgraded to unrestricted. COP says they do it all the time, it's standard procedure, blah blah blah.
This sounds like a total runaround to me. Makes me glad my experience was better than this. At least I'll get more range time with my friend.