ARGH!

This country is bloody ridiculous sometimes. Matrikulation was a huge disaster. I mean, in Cambridge it was just an excuse to dress up in our gowns and ponce around a bit before signing a piece of paper. Here it's a massive black hole of bureaucratic nightmaricy. Here is the process in bullet points:

1. Go to desk.
2. Wait in (something that in abroadland counts as a) queue.
   
3. Get piece of paper allowing you pay fees.
4. Go to other end of university and pay fees.
5. Go see a man who will write on a piece of paper that you have a piece of plastic proving that you have health insurance.
6. Return to desk.
7. Wait in "queue".
   
8. Receive number.
9. Wait.
10. Matriculate.

Anyone with a basic understanding of, well, just about ANYTHING can see that that is stupid. No multi-stage process should ever require returning to one of the earlier stages to proceed to the end. Especially not when this stage is a desk being run by ONE very stressed looking Italian woman. This is basically the platonic image of a bottleneck. Honestly, it was a better bottle neck than the actual neck of the actual bottle from which Jesus poured the wine in the Holy Grail before sacrificing himself to rescue the souls of mankind. (Except anyone working in the admin department of the Humboldt University, who are quite clearly servants of Satan.)

The system also allows no self initiative. My attempts to pay my fees at the Kasse without first going to the desk and getting my pink piece of paper allowing me to pay my fees were firmly rebuffed. So I go to the desk, wait for ages, and then receive my piece of pink paper, on which there stands not a single piece of information that was not already on some other piece of paper elsewhere. How ridiculous.

Even more ridiculous, by the time I had got my piece of pink paper giving me the right to give them my money and hurried down to the Kasse, it had shut. And that stupid cow down there was SOO rude. Bitch. I hope she gets very very itchy thrush. Well, with the Kasse shut until one I couldn't pay my fees, and without paying my fees I couldn't matriculate. The Kasse opens again at one, but this is when matriculation closes...

Excuse me?
No, but, actually, EXCUSE ME?

What the hell is wrong with these people? How on Earth can they have such amazing public transport but be SOOO rubbish at what is actually a fairly simple administrative task. Honestly, if they had just given me all the forms I could have done it myself in about ten minutes. FFS.

So, Bryn is now pissed off and has to go back tomorrow to finish it all off. *weeps*

Laterz.
Bryn
xxxx