Why my passport foto could bite you

After I got married it was time to change my passport with the new name - so I planned to do so at my country´s consulate in Bonn. There followed a small bureaucratic adventure that I must tell you about, if not for other purposes than to get it out of my mind.

I started by reading the instructions on the consulate´s website and got so confused with all the bureaucracy, trying to understand which cases I fit in. One thing clear was that I needed an appointment to change my passport. As it was difficult to catch a free phone line, my mom assisted me and spoke with a very nice lady who gave me the next free appointment... in about four months, sometime in July. I was happy: I imagined how I will go there to my appointment and solve everything quickly and efficiently. Yes, I am an incurable naive, I also still believe in Santa Claus.

At the due date my husband and I drove to Bonn - about two hours away from our place. As we got there, the receptionist - an elderly man - invited us to go in and wait in front of window number three. In the waiting room with the three windows I got a familiar feeling: so are the public offices in my home country - closed or barely opened windows, with long lines in frong of them and officials that only come once in a while to pick up or give a document. Point for Germany: here you are invited in the respective office, you sit down and are kindly helped and barely need to wait. I hope I am not idealizing it, maybe I was lucky until now. However I will never understand why some Germans complain about their bureaucracy - they should get the taste of the one in Romania for a change.

Well, we still had about an hour till my appointment, so we sat in the line and waited. The clerks were coming and going about once in an hour, picking documents, bringing forms or giving information from behind their glass windows. All was happening so slow, so painfully slow. The time for my appointment came and went, I was still in the line and had no idea whom to tell I should be now in a cosy office solving my stuff - there were no doors to knock on and the clerks were disappearing too quickly from the windows. I was starting to be impatient so I went back to the old man in the reception hall and asked him what´s up with my appointment.

That´s when I got blessed with the knowledge that that was the guy in charge of customer satisfation there. In two steps he was getting out of his cage, coming very close to me and explaining me that appointments don´t mean a thing, it´s just a way to keep masses from coming all at once. The he asked me, concerned but also a bit severe, if "I planned to make any problems". I´m not so comfortable with making other people´s lives difficult, so I agreed to go in again and wait like everybody else did.

Later I saw him calming down another very nervous lady and telling her "c´mon, go out, dring some coffee, smoke a cigarette and come back... maybe it will get better". There´s always a solution and you cannot be upset with someone who gives you such a reasonable advice.

So I got back waiting in line, while my husband was quickly losing all his patience and asking me if we should not better leave and get me the German citizenship when the time comes. Finally I got at the small window where a very polite lady asked me why haven´t I said that I had an appointment. Then she sent me to ... window number one where I should have sat from the beginning to register our mariage before she could issue me a new passport. I was boiling, the opening hours were almost ending, but I went and sat in line to window number one. To calm myself down I started imagining ways to make things better in this consulate, simple ideas how to treat the people better and help them more efficiently. I can´t help it, wherever I see problems I think of solutions too - and I was looking forward to sharing them with the nice lady who finally invited me to take photos and finger prints for the passport.

As I was also complaining about the chaos, one of the high officials stepped in the room (the program with the public was already closed) and started to explain to me that hey, this is Romania, what did I expect? Things will never change, and it´s actually very good that I get the taste of home bureaucracy every once in a while... not that I get bored here in over-organized Germany. I was arguing and presenting my ideas, like them getting some interns who can give information and forms and help organize the appointments better, but he argued loudly that such solutions are unreasonable and will never work in Romania. Then he complained on for minutes about their problems, their low pay and the stress with citizens who don´t read or understand what´s on the website (I knew I belong to this group too). So I ended up calming him down and telling him I was sorry for their stress and hard life. Also I promised myself never to cause them stress anymore, so for the first time I strongly decided to apply for a German citizenship and never step foot in the Romanian consulate again, cross my fingers.

The whole fun cost me about 400 Euro, but to see the glass half full I did get my documents in time. As I got my passport, sent to my home address, I could clearly remember of my frustration as I looked at the photo - it´s almost growling at me. In spite of the nice lady´s attempts to make me compliments and cheer me up, in my new passport photo I look serious and a bit ferocious, like a member of the Adams family.