More on Bureaucracy

September 16.  In what can only not be described as a stark contrast to my situation to date, I remain an officially nonexistent person. In the Netherlands, that is. I'm pretty sure some official evidence of my existence on the planet continues to be available in the U.S.

My last episode with the bureaucracy, during which we had the honor of shelling out 830.00 euros to apply for my permanent residency status, went very smoothly. We talked to the woman at Desk 7, who was not only pleasant, competent, and efficient, but who also clearly possessed a sense of humor (I predict she's not gonna last long in that job). By sense of humor, I mean she, unlike some people, could appreciate our sense of humor. As she remarked, they don't usually have people laughing at the immigration office while they're paying that ridiculous sum of money. And, just to make me feel better about the whole thing, she pointed out that my fee for the process included the addition of two nifty stamps to my passport alerting the world to my I'm-a-resident-in-the-Netherlands-even-if-it-isn't-permanent-yet status. When I remarked on how pretty and colorful the first stamp (sticker, really) was, she informed me that my second stamp would be even cooler, being actually an embossed insignia that would even show through on the back side of the page! We all smilingly agreed that, attractive as these fine additions to my passport indeed were, they were some expensive damn stamps. I tell you, they just don't make civil servants like that, as a rule. I bet she's gone within six months.  

Yesterday I received the immigration ministry's standard letter about how my application has been received and might even be looked at some day. This letter just happened to include the little tidbit of trivia that the immigration law is expected (I am not making this up - "het is de verwachting") to change (in some undisclosed manner) on January 1, 2011, and that the changes in the law, "which may affect you," will apply to anyone who entered the country after July 1, 2010. Now I ask you, in what civilized, democratic country would it make sense to have people enter a country under one set of rules, but subsequently change the rules and then have the new rules apply retrospectively??? That kind of idiocy just makes me crazy. It oughta be unconstitutional.

And, while I'm lambasting the bureaucracy again, let me just add, for the record, this question: What kind of immigration office uses words like "bedrijfshulpverleningsorganisatie," (33 letters; count 'em if you don't believe me, folks)  in an information document intended for anyone who walks into the building, most of whom are, um, NOT Dutch? Not a space, comma, or hyphen anywhere to be seen; no, just "bedrijfshulpverleningsorganisatie." Takes up half the bloody line of text. I ask you!! Heaven help anyone with dyslexia in this country!

On Bureaucracy

September 1. We have been here nearly a month, but I still do not officially exist. We are waiting for me to be assigned the Dutch equivalent of a social security number, without which I cannot get a job or even open a bank account. We should have had it by now already, but one thing that hasn't been a culture clash is dealing with bureaucracy. Bureaucrats are bureaucrats, wherever they are. It's a mind set, a behavior pattern, yea I suspect genetic underpinnings! You'd think I'd be inured to the sheer idiocy of it, after having been a U.S. federal victim employee for 12 years and a life-long victim recipient of various federal agencies' demands and services. But no. My first experience here, when we went to the city hall to register our residency in Breda and apply for my BSN number, was classic.

The Dutch government requires apostilles of everything. An apostille, in English, is an authentication from the state that your certified state vital statistics-type document was certified by someone actually recognized by the state to have the authority to validate the particular vital-statistics-type document in question (god, I hate sentences that have the word "certified," "authentication," and "validate" in them, much less all three. And now let's just go ahead and add "apostille" to the list, shall we?).  The processes of obtaining apostilles for my birth certificate, our marriage license, and Ben's birth certificate were a pain in the pick-your-body-part, but we duly applied for, paid for, received, and brought with us all of these documents (can we add the word "documents" to the above list?)  to the scheduled appointment. The idiot bureaucrat in question - oops sorry, that was redundant, wasn't it? - failed to find any evidence of said appointment on the books. Nevertheless, she graciously condescended to officiate (add to list above). When she got to the apostille for my birth certificate, she was disapproving. For whatever bizarre reason, my official, apostilled, State of New York birth certificate nowhere lists the names of my parents. Which I grant you is strange and unexpected. She was not sure she could accept said document due to lack of said names. I was very well behaved and didn't say a word to her (Wijo was handling the whole transaction  and I decided to keep my mouth shut rather than share my true feelings). Now, here's my position on this sort of thing.  DO NOT TELL me exactly what I am required to do, make me jump through all the hoops necessary to DO EXACTLY WHAT YOU ASKED, and then tell me the final official (add to list), authenticated exactly-what-you-asked-for-document is unacceptable. If that's my official NY birth certificate, it's goddamnwell my official NY birth certificate, and ain't no other form of my official NY birth certificate $&! available, I tell you! I could have throttled her with the yarn I was sitting there spinning on my drop spindle in a futile attempt to hang on to a shred of sanity. We were saved, ultimately, by the fact that our official, authenticated-by-the-State-of-Virginia marriage license, does, in fact, list my parents' names, which I had to point out to her after she checked and remarked, in feigned regret, that their names were not there either (at which point I did jump into the fray and play the Game of Bureaucracy, informing her that the names were listed as items 21 and 22 on the document). I think Wijo was absolutely amazed that I did not, at any time during that protracted and painfully bureaucratic meeting, attempt homicide. Nope, I'm still a free and at-liberty non-citizen.

My next scheduled dance with Bureaucracy is on Thursday, when we go to den Bosch to apply for my permanent residency status. Can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to it.   

I'm Too Old for This

Well, much as I believe it should be optional, reality started setting in early, and I've been having some difficulty with it (nothing new there!). Clearly, Holland is every bit the consumer culture that the U.S is. People seem to be really into the latest "cool" gadgetry - fancy cell phones that do everything but cook dinner for you, flat-screen tvs, computers, internet, video gaming systems, the whole bit. But try to cook or do the laundry, and the situation is somewhat primitive, by my standards. I admit to being a spoiled American and taking lots of things for granted. But since this is a major industrialized western nation with all that other luxury crap, it strikes me as bizarre that I'm dealing with a toy refrigerator, a toy oven, a washing machine that requires 90-120 minutes to do a single (not very large) load of laundry, and a dryer so inefficient that most laundry has to be hung on a line. I mean, the high-tech luxury stuff is fun and all, but are not, as far as I'm concerned, requirements of daily living. The requirements of daily living do include food and laundry management, and I'm finding it very frustrating that these things are so difficult, limited, and unnecessarily complicated. I mean, I don't care what features the cell phone has, as long and I can turn it on and make a call (which, by the way, I could not figure out how to do), but it does bother me that I can't fit a bottle of seltzer into the refrigerator and that a 9" x 13" pan (and nothing in addition at the same time) barely fits into and is practically impossible to remove from the oven (major accident risk, that). The owners of this house clearly are more interested in wine than food, because the kitchen's built-in temperature-controlled wine cellar occupies double the space the refrigerator does. 

It irks me to have to hang up the wash to dry (on lines, I might add, that are much too high for me to reach comfortably because the owners of this house are freakin' giants). It's the 21st century, for cripes sake! With skype, I can make an inexpensive phone call or computer-to-computer web cam-enhanced call to just about anywhere in the world; why I am hanging laundry up on a line to dry? In a country, I might add, in which the average monthly relative humidity ranges from 67%-88%, and in which some degree of precipitation occurs an average of 217 days per year (translation: forget about hanging the laundry outside to dry). And many people here don't even own clothes dryers.

I do feel guilty and spoiled for letting things like appliances depress me (but in my own defense, in case you imagine I am exaggerating, see below for the actual photos of the actual appliances in our rented house with the actual recently remodeled, up-to-date kitchen - bring back dorm room memories?). The truth is I'm feeling too old for this. I could probably have adapted fine in my 20's or 30's, but I just don't want to live like a graduate student any more, and I do want things to be fairly easy, uncomplicated, and comfortable. It's way more difficult for me to figure out, learn, and remember things than it used to be, which makes me nervous about incipient Alzheimer's (Ben used to pronounce it "old-timers," because that's what he thought the word was!). My mind is obviously nowhere near as nimble as it used to be, but I'm not so far gone yet that I can't notice the significant decrements in my cognitive functioning. I've been aware of my dropping IQ for a while, but it's not so noticeable when you're in a familiar environment in which you know how things work and have some sense of mastery. In a new and unfamiliar environment it becomes very noticeable. So I don't want to memorize or keep track of another whole set of phone numbers, account numbers, PIN codes, and passwords. I don't want to have to  read a whole new collection of users manuals (in Dutch, go figure!) because I can't figure out how anything works. When I turn on an appliance or electronic device - and it shouldn't be too hard, what with having a Ph.D. and all, to figure out how to turn these things on and off - I have this apparently naive assumption that it will actually go on and be usable. I leave you to imagine my frustration when things just don't happen that way.

There is a bright spot, though. I did finally figure out that it is possible to get the dryer to actually dry the laundry. See, there are approximately eleventy billion settings on the darn thing, but most of them are decoys! I was fooled at first, until I discovered the only setting that actually gets the clothes dry is "extra," which I had initially incorrectly interpreted according to American standards as "under no circumstances run anything potentially flammable for a full cycle in this mode unless you want your items alight or shrunken down to Madurodam size (and I don't mean the whole park, I mean the 1/25th scale model people in it, in case that wasn't clear)." It's a nefarious trick to fool Americans, I tell you! But now that I've realized "extra" is not a health and safety hazard, things are actually getting dried in substantially shorter than a 24-hr. period. I love modern technology, don't you?

Dear Friends and Family

As you might be aware, I've never been much of a fan of the whole blogging phenomenon. As I am aware, most of you are not particularly big blog consumers, yourselves. But since there are more of you than I can regularly keep up detailed email correspondence with, I decided I'd take a stab at sharing some of my experiences and perspectives as I try to adjust to becoming a permanent resident in the Netherlands. A country so small that, were I to start at any point in the country and drive the same distance it would take to get from my former home in Maryland to visit my parents in Rochester, NY, I would be at least one country away from where I started. A country where, at 5'6" tall, I cannot reach half of the cabinet or closet space, I can't borrow anyone's bicycle because I am too short to reach the pedals, and my biggest communication problem is not the language, but the crick in my neck I get from having to look up so damn far to talk to most of the natives.

To those of you to whom I have not yet managed to write personal emails, I apologize. I will write to you. Eventually. To those of you who will see things I have written to you repeated here, I apologize. I will continue to write to you, but perhaps in less detail, as the general details will go here.  To Leslie, thanks for being entertained enough by my emails to suggest I consider blogging. I'm doing so as much for therapeutic purposes as to keep people posted on life here, but I hope to continue being entertaining.

We've been here for five weeks now, so there's a little catching up to do. I will be back soon!