It seems that the card printing is as big a hit-and-miss affair as the rest of CFR.

Having a look through the license approvals thread, there are some people that collect their card within a week or so from their approval date (printed two days after approval).
Other are not so lucky. I think it was on the Gunsite BookFace page that a user mentioned his license was approved in August/September and he is still waiting for his card. I believe there are other people waiting even longer.

My license was approved on 24 October, so 9 days has passed now. Not that long, but after waiting 3 months for the license I really want to take my baby home. CFR call centre says the printer is broken/ the moon is in the wrong phase/whatever excuse they have this week.
What boggles the mind is that Home Affairs could get one of these newfangled biometric/smart ID cards in my hand 7 calendar days (5 work days) after applying.

So why is this such a problem for CFR?
I don't know what the setup is like at card printing division, but it sounds like they've got some serial setup (one guy, one computer and one printer). If any of the 3 goes down, the whole process grinds to a halt. I would hope that they could set up a parallel queue with multiple printers accessing the database simultaneously and thereby upping the throughput. This will also add redundancy to the process, since no single printer/computer/operator can stop the entire process.

/rant off

Maybe someone can now start the thread for card collections, so that we can start monitoring that as well.