Bureaucracy gone wrong

Papers are important. We need them. It is necessary some record of your existence, a way to prove who you are, where you came from, what you are able to do or not. I remember my classes about Max Weber and his conception of bureaucracy as an “iron cage” that holds the individual inside. Bureaucracy is a way of control and a power struggle, and as Weber sentences, it is mostly based on written documents and rules.

During the last weeks, I have been working on all the documents I need prior to arriving in Germany. There were two ways to certificate a document: Original versus copy. I chose “copy”. It was the wrong way. At least, I just need a few days to fix my mistake, but I’m a little bit disappointed. Why did I choose “copy” instead of “original”? That is the enigma. Indeed, it is funny that it happened here, where I speak Spanish and I (professedly) understand everything they explain to me. The good thing about being “obsessive” is that I planned to have two weeks to solve any “unexpected procedure”.

Today, I started to read my DAAD-booklet in order to avoid any unpleasant surprise regarding German bureaucracy. The information is very helpful. Now, I know I have to open a bank account, to register in the immigration offices, to check that I have got the right type of visa (Bewerbervisum). It seems that I should expect many hours of waiting lines. Stamps, taxes, procedures, photographs, codes… It would be good for me to learn how to be patient.

However, I understand that bureaucracy is necessary to order this world, as I said before. The only concern I have got during these years, including my experiences as student and as professor, is the huge amount of “paper” that every institution needs to work. Nowadays, technology could help to reduce the use of paper, to share information in real time and to provide solutions to our bureaucratic demands. Environmentally, bureaucracy should be reborn. Is a paperless institution the answer? I’m not sure either. It probably will require more energy to work. Besides that, the information is so worthy and so sensitive that I think it could be safer to print it in a physical record.

My simple bureaucratic slip-up is now waiting in the recycling basket near my desktop. It has joined some advertising brochures, old newspapers, bank receipts, a draft of an article and other paper-based documents. I should plant a tree before I go.