Blummin´ Bureaucracy

There is so much admin and bureaucracy around moving and living overseas. And it is virtually always excruciatingly painful and frustrating. So listen into Ginger Gerald´s experience, stories and words of wisdom to enlighten and entertain you....and to let you know that you are not alone! Enjoy!

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Transcript

Today we are going to discuss Blummin´ Bureacracy. Maybe I should have released this episode on a Monday morning – that would have been more appropriate given the stressful nature of its content – but as Thursday is now the traditional Ginger Gerald Release Day I´m going to stick to my Thursday routine!    

OK Listen up! I´m going to read a short list of scenarios out to you and, wherever you are and whatever you are doing right now, I want you to say out loud the phrase “oooh that´s annoying” after each one. If you don´t find the scenario I describe particularly annoying then you should just whisper “ooh that´s annoying” but if the scenario I mention drives you completely and utterly nuts, then shout it at the top of your voice “Ooh that´s annoying” and feel free to add any expletives you like, whatever makes you feel better. OK you got the rules? I´ll explain why we are doing it afterwards….

1.       Trying to speak to someone from Ryanair on the phone

2.       Receiving emails asking you to rate a Company´s service when they provided you with shocking or no service at all

3.       Finally getting to the front of the queue in Aldi only for them to open another till 

4.       Having to change a password for an online account, only for the code to get sent to a phone number you no longer have

5.       Trying to configure Intelligent Lightbulbs

6.       Completing and submitting your tax declaration online

7.       Following ikea wardrobe construction instructions

8.       Getting your passport photo rejected because you have one little hair out of place

Well, that was fun – I hope none of you crashed or got weird looks from your neighbours (or your kids). The purpose of that little game was to both free up your inner spirit a little and get you shouting out loud for no rational reason and also as an introduction to the fact that, despite living in an unbelievably advanced technical world, many of the processes and systems put in place to protect us, to benefit us and to make our lives easy are actually incredibly annoying, ineffective and time-wasting.

And that´s when you live a “normal” life – by which I mean that you stay in the country that was assigned to you at birth! Imagine how much worse things are if you are one of those crazy people, like Ginger Gerald here, who has moved numerous times from one part of the globe to another? Now, don´t get me wrong, I know I´m a lucky barstard, we´ve already established that on this podcast, and I´m more than aware that there are so many fabulous benefits of living in different countries with different languages and a different mix of cultures, but one of them is definitely not the huge pile of administration you are obliged to do. Blummin´ Bureaucracy I call it and it´s a pain in the backside.

I was listening to a very learned and highbrow expat podcast the other day (not dissimilar to GGYLB actually but with slightly longer words and more of a BBC accent!) - I like to check out the competition in my spare time to see who and what´s in my space. Anyway, they started discussing the bureaucratic burden on the expat – residency, banks, Social Security, Health Care all of that jazz. Just listening to them speak calmly and intelligently, I could feel the bile rising to my throat and I broke out into a cold sweat. It´s not because I haven´t done it or can´t do it – it´s just that I find it all such a pain in the bum and almost invariably frustratingly and painfully slow and inefficient.

Now in our 25 minute slot I´m not going to be able to go through all of the procedures us Ginger Geralds have to complete when we move and live overseas (thank the Lord for that I hear you say) so I´m going to select just 4 – 4 of the very best (or the very worst depending how you look at it). However, there are frustrating elements to each of these 4 examples which I think many of you will relate to – or at least they will act as cautionary tales for those who are still in the planning or dreaming stage. 

Let´s start with the biggun for us foreigners abroad: Residency. Now many of us opt for the so-called “easy” option on this one and they pay someone who is (or at least claims to be) an Immigration Lawyer or at least an Immigration Admin Guru! Some of these people, and I take my hat off to them, are worth their weight in gold (providing you´ve got some gold as their services don´t always come cheap); they know the system inside out, they´re usually bilingual or proficient in English (have you listened to last week´s “It´s all Double Dutch to me” yet?) and the biggest plus is that they take all the stress away from you and reduce your own input and exposure to the authorities to an absolute minimum. Now, it may not surprise you to know that Ginger Gerald tended not to go for this option – he preferred to do it himself! I´m not sure that was always the wisest decision but at least you learn a lot along the way – if you live to tell the tale that is. 

I can remember the poky little “foreigner´s office” in downtown Cancún where for a while we seemed to spend half of our lives. And I bet this place is (or at least it was) so typical of these offices all over the world. The queue was always massive, people paid other people to get there before dawn to grab a good place in the line for them and the queue was outside with no shade from the rain or the sun. Inside the office was tiny, smelly, old and boiling hot. The process tended to go like this: first you queue up for ever to be told you are in the wrong queue. You can´t even see another queue let alone join it. Eventually you give in your entire file containing passports, photos, documents in triplicate, originals and copies of every possible certificate you´ve ever owned to prove you exist and who you are – all of them translated and officially stamped (at great expense) and, importantly, you are 100% sure that you have provided absolutely everything they requested and that you´ve followed to the letter the rubbish instructions you were given on the bag of a fag packet when you queued up the week before. Then you wait. And sweat. You keep your eyes firmly fixed on your own file to make sure it doesn´t get lost, stolen, dropped or shoved to the back of the queue. And then you wait a bit more. You can´t go to the loo (good job as there weren´t any) because you might miss your name being shouted out and then you´ve got another two hours wait. Eventually your name gets announced (well, something that very vaguely resembles your name – you´ve got to listen very carefully) and it finally feels like you´ve won the lottery. You put a smile on your face, jump up to be attended and launch into your opening speech (which you´ve been rehearsing for the previous 3 or 4 hours) when someone else barges in front of you and steals the Immigration Officer´s attention. How rude we think being British. How bloody annoying more to the point. Now this barger-inner will be one of those lawyers or admin gurus I mentioned a moment ago – and most likely they used to work at the Immigration Office or they´re an Officer´s sister or father, or maybe they´re sleeping with one of them who knows. And they don´t have just one person´s case in their grubby vanilla, cardboard file – they have a dozen of ´em. Now you have a choice: you can go completely bonkers at this outrageous injustice and writhe around on the floor like you´re Neymar looking for a penalty (and get kicked out by security), or you can be patient, stay calm and stay put – after all when the guru´s finished, you at least want to be next up. Finally, finally, finally you manage to get someone´s full attention (hopefully it´s not time for their lunch or a fag break) only for them to nicely inform you that you are missing a document – you know that document that you´ve never even heard of and which had never ever before been mentioned before….. See you next week! Oooh that used to make my blood boil!

I´m sure this is not just specific to México! In Spain they like a bit of bureaucracy too – plenty of triplicate documents, photos, fingerprints, translations, apostilles all that stuff but at least it feels much more logical and a bit fairer. You feel you can see light at the end of the tunnel. We still had the joy of early morning queues in the rain or sun, but we got our residency sorted quite quickly and then knew that there´d be no more Residency admin for ages for us – or so we thought. Then that fateful day came – Brexit results day! Now I may be wrong but I´m guessing that the majority of you listening to this pod right now wouldn´t or didn´t vote to leave the EU. But the big red bus with its lies about the NHS won the day and the very honorable David Cameron scarpered to some tax haven or other. What a complete nightmare that was for Brits living within the EU at that time or, even worse, for those planning to move out, and what ensued was a period of complete confusion and panic. It turned out that Ginger Gerald was, once again, a bit of a lucky Barstard – if that´s what you call it – all thanks to his Grandad. I was one of over 80,000 people who suddenly realized that we were entitled to and could apply for Irish Citizenship and therefore an EU passport (I knew that having red hair would come in useful one day). To any “genuine” Irish listeners – I am sorry, I know you think we´re just English dressed up as Irish and I apologize for that, but it was a means to an end for very many thousands of us, and it worked. However, you can´t pass on your newfound citizenship to your nearest and dearest – so the rest of the family, together with most Brits living in the EU at that time, had to follow a load of new instructions to avoid the risk of being kicked out of the place they had chosen to call their home. And so the fun began – one set of rules were announced in the UK, a completely different set came out of Brussels and (in our case) a 3rd set from Madrid. And despite all of the official sources, and perhaps for the first time in history, facebook expat groups seemed to be the most reliable source of up to date and accurate information! But you had to be very careful what questions you asked or what advice you gave, because the Secret Brexit Cyber Police would be onto you to censor your every word and repeat offenders were shot dead with mouse still in hand!  

Well that was Residency – it took a little while didn´t it -  I told you it was the biggun. So let´s move onto our 2nd most painful area of Foreigner Admin: Finances.

To open a Bank Account you need an address. To get an address you need a rental agreement or House Ownership Documents – and to get them you need to have a Bank Account. The dark and grim vortex of slow and painful death by bureaucracy. We all suffer from it from time to time and it´s exasparating. 

Everyone who lives abroad at some point needs to transfer money from one currency and country to another. And we don´t use traditional banks do we? Oh no, costs a fortune and takes forever. So we think, aha I can use paypal I´m sure I´ve got an account. So you start to login but Paypal need to ensure that you really are who you say you are. So they send you that lovely little code ……… to a phone number you had even forgotten you ever owned in a country you forgot you had ever lived in! That´s a real bummer isn´t it – and how often does that happen? And that´s the end of that – your code goes off into the ether somewhere never to be retrieved. I wonder if outer space is full of all those codes just floating around trying not to crash into abandoned satellites or Elon Musk´s new world? Now, to be fair, in recent times, things have finally got much better and much easier with the likes of Revolut and Wise.

3rd up is another corker – designed and executed to make you want to roll into a ball, get into a suitcase in a dark room and never reappear. Moving county. Now when you move house from Casa 8 to casa 11, for example, on the same complex (which Ginger Gerald did indeed do in México) – then it´s really not very complicated. Hard work yes, and you need to lay on a load of beers and tacos for all of your helpers, but they just tip up, carry everything the 30m or so to the next house and shove everything in there. It still takes you a few days to get it all ready and a few weeks to unpack it all – but it´s a walk in the park. 

Now imagine moving from Bangkok to Birmingham, or from Los Angeles to Lahore or from Mexico to Mallorca – with a couple of dogs! Let me begin this particular tale of stress with a word of advice based on some quite considerable experience. Sell or donate everything you own apart from your kids (and your pets). Leave the country with your passport, your phone and a backpack. That is the only genuinely stress-free solution available.  And when you get to your new place, you can always spend a fortune (that you might not have) on slowly building up your Worldly crap all over again so that you can fall back into exactly the same trap in 5 or 10 years time! My advice may sound a little foolish, a little churlish maybe? Not when like Ginger Gerald & Co you have paid through the nose, had half of your possessions “go missing” somewhere en route and the other half delayed by months somewhere at sea. Oh and when the last few beaten up boxes finally do turn up (half empty) – they come with yet another wapping big import tax bill. That set of Asterix and Obelix books cost me an absolute fortune!   To be honest, our dogs did fair somewhat better. We reminded the pilot every two seconds that they were in the hold, and could he please keep an eye on them, but when we finally got to see them in Madrid and they were allowed out of their crates they went absolutely bezerk – and we were a little relieved! They had no worldly possessions to bring – so the journey was their only stress!

Now for my final scenario I should tell you that not everything always goes wrong and you do not always end up crying in a fit of frustration and impotence…so let´s end on a positive note! Getting your driving license. My daughter and I decided we´d try to get Mexican driving licenses. I didn´t really need one but she did as she´d only just started driving – so I went for moral support. We reckoned that our chances of walking out of the Tráfico office with one let alone two licenses were about the same as the odds of Stoke City winning the Champions League that year. Which, as it turned out, we didn´t. Anyway, we took a deep breath and in we went and all seemed to be going surprisingly efficiently until it came to the eye test. Neither of us had remembered to take our glasses! You know those letters they show you – the letters in the top line are MASSIVE, the size of a truck, and the ones at the bottom are like baby ants? Well neither of us could read the ones we were supposed to, we were just guessing, but the very kind examiner kept helping us, giving us little clues and she let us read out the nice big letters at the top. Eventually we got enough of them right and the examiner was absolutely delighted with us! All we had to do was pay her (in cash, I´m not sure that we were offered a receipt), and we walked out of there with two brand, spanking new and valid Mexican Driving licenses! Make of that story what you like but for us - what a result! 

So folks, it´s that time again. I hope I´ve made you laugh, cry and think – and I know I´ve made you scream because I sort of obliged you to do so at the beginning. There´ s so much bureaucracy and so many hoops to jump through and hurdles to get over when you move countries, but if it was much easier – maybe everyone would do it!