Thursday, July 26, 2007

Jesus Wept! I receive a visit from the departmental secretary, whose spies have informed her that I have rebooked my flight without letting her or the company travel office know. The travel service says I have to pay 90 euros to change the date.

What can I say? I am an adult, it is my ticket and the Emirates are doing the flying and they said it was fine, and mentioned no charge. Clearly I have not followed correct procedure and there it much shaking of heads.

It is this kind of thing that makes people I work with say “Oh, that is so fucking German!” Germans are exceptionally well organised, but they do like their forms and their processes.

After further consultation, it seems I do have to pay the travel service 90 euros for doing nothing, but my blood pressure was up and it was only 11am.

I have lunch with another Australian intern, recently arrived, who is also trapped in a nasty German paperwork vortex. She can’t get paid until she has a visa and bank account, but she can’t get a visa until she had registered with the town hall and got a health insurance card and despite applying for all these things it is taking time. In the meantime she is bring her lunch (cabbage and carrots) and feeling rather unmotivated at work.

1 Comments:

Blogger Tokyo Girl said...

But, I have similar problems in Australia. Some of the roads in Sydney require you to have an e-tag or an e-pass to drive on them (they do not take cash). And yet it is impossible to get either an e-pass or an e-tag without a credit card, but no Australian bank is willing to give me a credit card because I have no credit history here (when I lived in Germany, credit cards that I had not even applied for just turned up in the post). And yet I cannot build up a credit history until I am given some credit. As a result every time I drive along a cashless road or through a cashless tunnel, I receive a fine of $8.

August 4, 2007 at 6:41 AM  

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