"You're just a penny stealing wannabe criminal man..."


In talking to my Mom on IM the other day, a funny story came to mind that I had forgotten to post. First, I present the email that started it all:

From: Paetzold, Walter
To: Corinne McCoy, David LeGendre, John Clark
Subject: Very Urgently

Hi

Steffi Soehnel (International Office) asked me to inform you that you have to registrar at the Einwohnermeldeamt (Anmeldung beim Einwohnermeldeamt) until today (18.06,2004). You have forgotten to registrar in Drewden!! If you don't do it, they intend to involve the police to look for you!!

Best Wishes
Walter

Let's take a minute to reflect on this. Police, register, Dresden... oh yeah... So the deal here in Germany is that whenever a person changes their city of residence, they're required to do what is called an Abmeldung (de-registration) in the old city, and then an Anmeldung (registration) in the new one. We tried to get this done when we first moved here, but something was wrong with our Abmeldung in Zittau, and so the officials here told us that we had to go back there and get it cleared up.

Now if you've read any of my previous updates regarding German bureaucracy, you know that the odds of finding somebody actually working on any given day are slim to none. Furthermore, add the fact that we have to travel all the way to Zittau (about two hours), and that our only weekday off from classes is Friday, and we can easily watch the odds of finding help drop to about that of winning the lottery. Since our student visas said that we were legally allowed to be in the country until August, we opted to get it taken care of when we "got around to it". The problem being, that time never really came, at least not until I was woken up by John pounding on my door with threats of the police coming to drag me out of bed in my underwear. (Could be exciting, I've seen some cute police women, but stil...)

In any case, we went to the international office, and were told to go try the registration office once again. (Yes, the very same office that had told us initially to go back to Zittau before returning to them.) We told them of our plight, and wouldn't you know, they could do everything from right there at their computer terminals... Abmeldung, Anmeldung, all of it. All of these services didn't even cost us anything... well, not really. (We had to pay a 10 Euro fine for not getting it all done within two weeks of our arrival.)

All things considered, you're probably asking the very same question we were right after leaving... "Why didn't they help us the first time around?" Could it be a ploy to extort 10 Euro out of newcomers to Dresden? Maybe. Could it be that they simply don't give a rat's ass about helping people? Maybe again. Both of these questions, however, ignore the fact that we've been living here for almost four months now, and it took them that ENTIRE TIME to figure out that we were here illegally. Sometimes I'm forced to wonder, with stupid things like this happening presumably all of the time, how is it anything EVER gets done here? Your guess would be as good as mine. Until that day...




Back