bktheirregular

Most of the day was spent on translating stuff dealing with, of all things, natural gas distribution. Interrupted by work on labor law. All with top priority.

And one interruption to deal with tax issues. To wit:

"It's a green form, sent by the government, the tax office."
"Yeah, I looked. Actually, I haven't seen one piece of mail from the government sent to me at my apartment, and I've been specifically looking out for those."
"I guess they didn't send it. Who knows what might have happened?"
"Hey, don't forget, these are the same idiots who sent my draft notice to the wrong address and then only followed up by angrily calling to ask why I wasn't at the army induction..."

Note to self: never again go to the power company offices to try to transact business on the last day of the month. *shudder*

So right as I'm getting ready to go back to New York for a week, for some reason, the military conscription office (they don't recruit people into the military here in Greece, except in the loosest sense of the word) called my aunt, even though I'd given them all my information back at the end of last month.

The message I'd gotten then: sometime this year I'd have to go to boot camp.

The message my aunt got today: I've got to go to boot camp right away.

And in the same phone call, the lady calling my aunt said "I'm on vacation in August, get back to me in September.

Right hand, meet left hand. The two of you get f@$&ing acquainted and call me back when you've got your goddamn stories straight.

Got a call back today from the county government office that cut my paychecks from 1995 to 2002; they put together a notarized letter which they're going to send to the New York address, which should (hopefully) satisfy the Greek consulate.

This is good news. Why am I waiting for the other shoe to drop?

Report came last night from New York that I don't need to travel back there in order to get my past-foreign-resident status confirmed. No, all I need to do is come up with a notarized certification that I was working for the Bergen County government from 1995 to 2002, and get it to the consulate.

That, and figure out a date to change my ticket back to New York, which I bought when I wasn't sure I'd be allowed to stay in Athens past July 1.

Here's how it is.

My apartment is in Kolonaki, a rather nice neighborhood on the south slope of Mount Likavitos, about twenty minutes' walk northeast of Plateia Syntagma, which for argument's sake, we'll call the center of Athens.

There's a post office about five minutes' walk away from my apartment, or at least there was, last time I checked. However, a few weeks back, one of my summer-weight blazers turned up in my family's closets back in New York. The simple solution was to send it via air mail, which basically went off without a hitch.

The notice I got to pick it up didn't direct me to the post office in Kolonaki; instead, it gave an address on the far side of Plateia Omonia, which is something like half an hour's walk to the northwest of Kolonaki, and is only open until two PM, Monday through Friday, to boot, so going there after work is a non-starter.

Last week, I finally managed to get around to picking up the jacket; it meant taking an extra-long lunch hour to do so.

The next day, I got another notice of a package from the USA waiting for me at the same station. I thought, hm, maybe something else was sent that I wasn't aware of.

Today, I was smart; I took the metro to Omonia from Panepistimiou, a little northwest of my office. Then I pounded through a neighborhood that family members have described as pre-Disneyfication Times Square, and got to the post office.

Only to find out that the pickup notice was a second notice for the jacket I'd picked up last week.

One day, I'm going to go into an office of the bureaucracy to do something, and everything will go off without a hitch. And when that happens, I'll probably die of shock.

Which, come to think of it, isn't nearly as funny as it would have been five days ago.

Yesterday, I went to set up an appointment to get a Greek national identity card; I was told that among other things, I'd need an original ("προτοτυπο", from which the word "prototype" is derived) of the paper certifying that I'm the son of a Greek citizen. Since I'd gotten the paper from the consulate in New York, I didn't have an original or a certified copy, just a photocopy.

The paper had been issued by the Attica Periphery Office (about equivalent to a state government, though less powerful, I figure), and there was a telephone number on the copy of the letter I had with me. So I did the obvious thing: I called.

Same thing I did yesterday with the police office, as a matter of fact, and the same result, namely gornischt. So I found the address of the Periphery office and went down there on my lunch break today.

I got there, and there was a crowd packed into the building's lobby, waiting to do business with the Periphery offices on the first floor (that'd be the second floor to people in the US of A). A fellow came down and handed out numbers, deli-style; I got number 42. Then the crowd started to meander up the stairs, people in back trying to push forward, oblivious to the narrowness of the curving stair and the treachery of the steps on the inner circumference of its curve.

Greek style.

On the first floor of the dingy building, there was a notice: the Periphery Office is open from 12:00 to 14:00, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Three days a week, two hours a day; no wonder it's tough to get stuff done. I struck up a conversation with an Irish-Greek gent who ended up next to me in the crush (this after someone trying to cut in line by saying he only had to take care of one item; I responded by snapping "I only need one piece of paper; I'm number 42, and I'm waiting", leaving the "so shut up, fraktard" unsaid because I didn't know how to translate it into Greek). The Irish-Greek guy, number 21, offered to see if he could find out if I was even in the right place; some other people had inferred that I'd have to go to a different office to get the original.

I got beckoned in ahead of time; the Irish-Greek fellow hollered for "Mr. Bush", or maybe it was "Mr. Bruce", because the spelling of my first name in the Greek alphabet is mangled enough that people might make the mistake honestly. He'd found out who I needed to see, and the people minding the door waved me in. (I normally don't like queue-jumpers, but when you're beckoned in by the people guarding the door, it's not quite the same.)

After that, it got simpler. I found the lady whose name was on the piece of paper I'd gotten from the consulate, and explained that the police office wanted a "prototype". I handed her a printout of a PDF scan I'd made of the document in question. (Important note: if you've got access to a scanner, and critical documents you may need, you may find it saves an awful lot of time to make scans of those documents, so you can print them out as needed.) She rummaged in the files, found the originals of my records (including a birth certificate with the image of the state of Wisconsin on it, which I realized had to be my father's), and made a couple of copies of the authorization letter, stamped as true copies and signed.

It was actually fairly simple.

Maybe a bit of good karma coming back my way after the meat-grinder that's been my experience with the Greek bureaucracy to date.

Got a couple of copies of the Greek version of my birth certificate from my cousin's colleagues this afternoon; one is for my records just in case, and the other is for me to deliver to a police registry office to get on record as being a Greek citizen.

I plan to ask point-blank if that gives me the right to stay in Greece.

The manager at the office here asked me what the point was in continuing with the work permit application if my Greek citizenship's coming through? I struggled with the Greek, finally switched to English, and gave my opinion that I'd better keep trying with both tracks until one of them has reached a conclusion.

So tomorrow morning, with luck, the last step in my nearly two-year tangle with the Greek bureaucracy.

(After a detour to Athens International Airport to recover a package sent to me. Somewhere in my travels, one of my two business suits went missing, so I had to get a replacement. It was ordered and delivered to New York, and my folks sent it to me in Athens; unfortunately, it's stuck in Customs, waiting for me to pay a duty fee and a storage fee and a paperwork fee that, collectively, come close to fifty percent of the price of the suit on its own. Seriously. Whiskey tango foxtrot?)

Paraphrased again:

Me: "Hello, I spoke with you a couple of weeks ago [about certifying past foreign residency]. I've got business at the Consulate Monday morning, and I was wondering if I could make an appointment?"
Colonel: "Sorry. I'm on vacation Monday and Tuesday, and then I'll be busy preparing for a presidential state visit. You'll call me back on April the tenth and we'll set up an appointment, okay?"

Now, if you'll all excuse me, I need food.