A Leauki's Writings
Published on September 17, 2005 By Leauki In Humor
I wrote this years ago when I lived in Germany. It's about an experience with German bureaucracy. Now I live in Ireland and don't find it funny any more. But you might.



Today I had to go get a form from this district's internal revenue service agency. Luckily www.berlin.de gives you ample telephone numbers to call to find out where to get the form in question.

Of course none of the numbers worked.

The telephone rang all right, but even after half an hour nobody answered. It was the same an hour later when I called again to test. I also tried all the other numbers given for my district. Nobody ever answered.

Now, I understand that these people are overworked (or could be) and might not be able to answer the phone (or won't), but why do they have a phone number in the first place? Wouldn't it be easier to just give the public a room number on the Web site rather than a telephone number, since the public has to call personally anyway and cannot, apparently, phone, since, apparently, nobody in the agency ever answers the phone?

I guess it would be.

So I eventually decided to make a personal appearance without first knowing where I would have to go.

Luckily the department in question was easily located. A heard a phone ring constantly.

They have this waiting number system. There is a sort of toilet paper roll with sheets of papers with numbers on it (and apparently not many people ever turn up in the department because I got number 2). Oddly enough there was no mechanism at all that would allow the clerks to actually know if somebody was waiting. So everybody had a number (a second person arrived a few minutes after me and got number 3). And since the office was already open for four hours, there was no way of knowing when number 1 was there or when he left.

(The waiting number toilet paper roll was patented, of course. Ideas, so-called "intellectual property", have to be protected. Without such protection, inventors would have no incentive to invent stuff and we would have no waiting number toilet paper at all. And that would be terrible, wouldn't it?)

But they must have a system for knowing whether somebody is waiting because after only a few minutes I was called. The whole shebang took about five minutes after the waiting.

I found it only mildly disturbing that the ringing phone was not one of the phones the clerks had on their desks.

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