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Description
"There is no such horror as German bureaucracy..." The words of my Mom echoed in my mind when I walked down the cool, dimly lit corridors in the town hall. They bore the smell of paper, ink, and dying potted plants. When I entered the town hall, a pale, elderly, balding man had given me a paper with the forms I had to obtain and fill out, and with a map of the town hall. What would I need the map for, I thought naively...
The next three hours I spent visiting all the offices to collect the forms, and while the first was a bright, friendly place where the young woman had helped me politely, the offices one by one grew darker, colder and less welcoming, while the way to them became more and more difficult and time-consuming. By the moment I had all the needed paper - a heavy, tall pile of about forty forms with at least three pages each - in my hands and was on my way to the last office, I was a wreck. When I turned around the last corner and saw the corridor, I almost melted down. It was dark, and three high hurdles had been placed in front of the door. There would have been space to circumvent them, but trespassing was prohibited in form of a tall, muscular, armored man, confidently standing there and watching me, seemingly ready to kick me back into oblivion if I decided to break the rules. I gathered the rest of my sanity and courage, and took a run to leap over the first hurdle. The man just watched me, but the stack of paper I carried suddenly felt like marble in my arms. It pulled me down, I fell, and somehow missed the ground, falling, falling..

... I awoke, lying beside my bed, screaming.

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No, this is no true story. German bureaucracy might be slow and boring, but it isn't nearly as horrendous as described here.

As usual, image is no stock.

Description
"There is no such horror as German bureaucracy..." The words of my Mom echoed in my mind when I walked down the cool, dimly lit corridors in the town hall. They bore the smell of paper, ink, and dying potted plants. When I entered the town hall, a pale, elderly, balding man had given me a paper with the forms I had to obtain and fill out, and with a map of the town hall. What would I need the map for, I thought naively...
The next three hours I spent visiting all the offices to collect the forms, and while the first was a bright, friendly place where the young woman had helped me politely, the offices one by one grew darker, colder and less welcoming, while the way to them became more and more difficult and time-consuming. By the moment I had all the needed paper - a heavy, tall pile of about forty forms with at least three pages each - in my hands and was on my way to the last office, I was a wreck. When I turned around the last corner and saw the corridor, I almost melted down. It was dark, and three high hurdles had been placed in front of the door. There would have been space to circumvent them, but trespassing was prohibited in form of a tall, muscular, armored man, confidently standing there and watching me, seemingly ready to kick me back into oblivion if I decided to break the rules. I gathered the rest of my sanity and courage, and took a run to leap over the first hurdle. The man just watched me, but the stack of paper I carried suddenly felt like marble in my arms. It pulled me down, I fell, and somehow missed the ground, falling, falling..

... I awoke, lying beside my bed, screaming.

------------------------------------------------------

No, this is no true story. German bureaucracy might be slow and boring, but it isn't nearly as horrendous as described here.

As usual, image is no stock.