TRAVEL & HUMOUR

You Can’t Escape Bureaucracy

Spain’s paperwork, rubber stamps and gratuitous paperwork are a bureaucrat’s wet dream

Just when everything seems to be going so well, you know a bureaucrat will step in to bring you back down to Earth with a rubber stamp and five pages of forms to complete. In capital letters and black ink only. In duplicate.

And it was all going so well. This seemed such a perfect place to live.

When you think about it, there are many reasons why Spain attracts so many ex-pats from the UK and from the USA, Canada and Ireland. There are over 300,000 British ex-pats living in Spain, and we’re not here just for the 20C / 70F winter temperatures.

When you’re in Spain, you marvel at how the Spanish way of life is focused more on family, friends and lifestyle than work and financial gain.

When you consider the cost of living, you find it’s much lower when compared to the UK or USA; housing, food and drink and travel are all cheaper. Private healthcare can be as much as five times less expensive than in the UK or USA, and there is also an excellent free public system.

When you live here you see that the Spanish excel at many things: sport, healthcare, design and architecture, life expectancy, food and drink, culture and public transport.

And just when you start to believe this is all too good to be true, you find it is. The Spanish excel at one more thing. Unfortunately, that thing is the irrational, frustrating, perverse, illogical, gratuitous, pointless and time-consuming feature of all aspects of the Spanish way of life: Bureaucracy.

When the UK left the EU, we had to apply to exchange our EU citizen documents for non-EU versions.

And it had all been going so well…

When you have first found the page you need for your application hidden somewhere in the Spanish Government’s website which assumes you know all the abbreviations and words they use for the various departments and processes and assumes you have an inherent ability to navigate the site without the benefit of there being a functioning menu system or help page.

When you can’t remember your password and there is no password reset or reminder option.

When you find your password scribbled on a piece of paper in a drawer but you still can’t use the site without downloading the proprietary Government digital certificate. And there are no instructions or any link to it. And you wonder why they just can’t use one of the readily available security apps on your phone?

When you find the proprietary digital certificate download page through a Spanish friend, you learn that to download and set up the digital certificate requires a first-class degree in computer and software engineering.

When you have eventually done this and your certificate works and you find the correct web page for your application, you find that the UK is not listed in either the EU or non-EU grouped countries on the drop-down menu.

When you have discovered that the UK has been allocated its own unique page separate from any other country in the world and the website makes no reference to this less-than-obvious anomaly or any link.

When you have located the correct document for your application on the unique UK web location and filled in several pages on the screen, you find you can’t submit your application online but you have to download it, print it out, make an appointment (online somewhere) and take the forms to a specified police station in person.

When you try to make an appointment but you can’t because you have to pay for your application first and there is no option to pay the fee online. Instead, you have to download the payment document you’ve just filled out, print it, and take it to one of a small set of specified bank branches to pay the fee in person.

When you go to a specified bank branch to pay the fee, they refuse to take your payment because it’s Monday and they only accept Government fee payments between 8.30 and 10.30 am on Tuesdays and Thursdays (why?) and the website never mentioned this and there are no other customers in the branch and the clerk has nothing else to do apart from clean their keyboard and screen.

When you return to the bank the next day at 8.30 am and there’s a queue and the person in front of you knows the bank clerk and they’re enjoying a nice chat. You notice the clerk has a sparkling clean keyboard, screen and desk.

When the clerk finishes arranging a lunch appointment with his friend, asking after every member of his friend’s family and discussing his Uncle Diego’s hernia, the bank clerk spends several minutes shuffling papers and chatting with a colleague before taking your payment and then making a nice little red rubber stamp on your piece of paper to confirm you’ve paid the fee. You can now go home to book an appointment at the police station.

When you go home and try to make the appointment, the system tells you that all appointment slots are now booked so please try again tomorrow, (I made up the please to make me feel better while writing this.) A pop-up informs you that appointment booking opens online from 9 am, Monday to Friday only.

When you spend the next week trying to book an appointment and by 9.01 am you get a pop-up message telling you that all available appointment slots are now booked so try again tomorrow. No, please.

When seven days later at 9.00 am and five seconds you finally get an appointment, it is for one month’s time.

When you go to the specified police station, on an industrial park on the outskirts of the city, one month later at the appointed time, a lady with a clipboard allocates you to one of four different queues without even consulting her clipboard.

When you get called in to see an official to deal with your application, she ignores you for several minutes while she moves papers around her desk and chats with her colleague.

When she does ask you to hand her your paperwork, you spend the next thirty minutes watching her re-type your entire application into her computer. Slowly.

When she has asked you to sign various pieces of paper in different places, she makes several nice little red rubber stamps everywhere.

When she has taken your fingerprints, scanned your photo and taken a copy of your passport even though you were unable to fill out the application in the first place without having first proved your ID with the online digital certificate and your unique Spanish ID number and having gone through exactly the same process just a short time ago when you made the application as an EU citizen. Except the police station for EU citizens’ applications was in the city centre and not on an industrial park on the outskirts.

When she doesn’t approve your application right away despite having completed and proved everything they had asked for, including confirming your ID and Spanish address. This is because your application has to be ‘processed.’ Which is what I thought we’d just done.

When she tells you to phone the office in one month to see if they have finished ‘processing’ your application because they don’t send any reminders to tell you. And if you don’t return within forty-five days they will cancel the application and you’ll need to start again.

When she tells you that when it is ready, you will have to return to the same police station on the same industrial estate on the edge of the city to collect it. It may be ready early. Or maybe not.

When your question as to why it can’t be posted out, registered delivery, is met with a blank stare and a call of, “Next.”

When you have phoned four weeks later and you’re told your application has been processed and approved, you return to the same police station on the same industrial estate on the same edge of the city.

When you arrive and you are allocated to a different queue by the bored lady with a clipboard who never looks at it.

When you are called into the police station and you are shown to a different office and a different official who ignores you for several minutes while he shuffles papers around his desk and chats with his colleague.

When the official checks your passport again and types a lot of stuff into his computer while you watch and wait.

When he passes you something to sign (in four places) and then makes a few nice little red rubber stamps on the papers.

When he flicks through a plastic card index file and pulls out a laminated card with a photo of your face on it.

It is only then you exchange your old Spanish EU ID card for your new Spanish non-EU ID card.

And now for the driving licence exchange. But first, I need to recover.

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