6 degrees of anticipation

In some ways, I think Spain is getting a bad rap for its bureaucracy and laid-back lifestyle. Don’t get me wrong, if you catch a bureaucrat on a morning when the family dog had the runs and he forgot the poop bags, your life will take a decided turn for the worse in a hurry. It may be the wrong historical reference, but these guys are the definition of little Napoleans as they rule over whatever regulation is in their domain. Little Francos may be more apt comparison.

But I continue to be surprised at how smoothly and efficiently many things work here. We’ve had two appliance repair service calls already, and in both cases the repair guys were prompt, friendly and got the job done in one trip. Maybe it was a little unique that the first guy actually showed up two days early, but hey, half the time back home they don’t show up at all. The last oven repair I needed in Maryland required five visits, four long discussions with various repair people and a stack of mysterious parts on my doorstep that measured five inches high. And no service with a smile.

Once you get past the initial challenge of finding the right person (which is compounded by my crappy excuse for Spanish, of course), the process tends to go remarkably well. Like most things in life, I think it comes down to the math.

The US population is about seven times that of Spain. That’s a lot of extra people. Plus, society here is far less consumption driven, meaning Spaniards are less about buying and owning “things” and more inclined to concentrate on the experience of life. This adds up to less stress on the system from top to bottom.

Think about it. Even taking scalability into mind, if there are far fewer widgets sold, there will be far fewer widget service needs. For that matter, even delivering a government service (knowing that stepping down the rabbit hole with a cranky bureaucrat is always possible) is less complex because the volume of people demanding that service is so much less. I could even make the argument that this plays out with technical systems. I’ve experienced a couple of examples where completing documentation with one part of the Spanish government causes the info to trickle down to another department, rendering the need to fill out another mound of paperwork with the second group unnecessary. The various systems do talk to each other, which anyone working in IT today knows is pretty much equivalent to scaling Everest in large organizations.

This might also have something to do with the size of the Spanish bureaucracy. The Spanish government offices I’ve seen always seem to have four people working, surrounded by 37 empty desks. The desks must get filled at some point, since it’s estimated about 2.6 million people are government employees here, or about 11% of the workforce. Compare that to estimates of the US that are somewhere between 1-3% of the workforce (and likely less than 2.6 million total). There are actually more civil service workers in Spain than people working in tourism. As Bart would say, Ay Carumba.

To say I’m surprised at the reality of relative efficiency here is a vast understatement. I expected everything to be slow, as in slow and no other speed available. But it’s simply not the case. Okay, there are so many extra desks in government offices that I’m thinking of getting into the office supply business, and the four desks being occupied only take four appointments an hour, but they do manage to get what you need done on the spot – as long as you bring along the correct stack of paper. Keep the Spanish mantra in mind. Have a cup of café con leche and a pastry, take a deep breath and it’ll get done in the end. There’s nothing wrong with laid-back.

RANDOM THOUGHTS: Speaking of café con leche (coffee with milk), a certain five-year-old has learned another great trick. After being told that he could no longer ask for a treat every time he spotted a bakery, he has shifted tactics. When a pastry sign appears, he now queries, “Anyone want a café con leche?” I am convinced that young minds literally have an unlimited potential when it comes to schemes… Some people are asking how I fill the days. It’s a bit of a mystery actually. I have dozens of unread books on my iPad and an unopened DVD set of the Wire on the shelf. The hours go by crazy fast regardless. At least part of it can be attributed to the fact that people here often start work late, take most of the afternoon off and vacation about six weeks a year, meaning finding them in office to get something done is a bit of a pickle… Liam continues to settle in well. New friends at school are being made. The bike is getting ridden. And the playgrounds in Barcelona are just as much fun to explore as those back home. The carefree life of a five-year-old is to be envied… Also remarkable is how perceptions change. I have spotted men in pink pants, or sporting a fashionable man-purse, or with a scarf tied jauntily around their neck – yet none of it seems particularly out of place. Try that in DC and get a giggle. Try it in the midwest and get chased… Whoever determined that all the grocery stores should be located at the bottom of a hill should be shot. At least, that’s my feeling every time I’m lugging 5 litre water jugs up as if I’m Rocky going back into training. Do they need extras for Rocky 14?

I have related to many people already my favorite moment in the process of getting all my paperwork in place in Spain, but I’ll retell it here. It came early on in the cat and mouse game to obtain a green residency card, during my first of many visits to the Spanish consulate in DC. I cautiously approached the counter, pulled out my passport and asked the first of many $64,000 questions, “What paperwork do I need to officially become a resident of Spain?”

The answer was, “Oh, you just show up!” Just show up? I must have missed the “just show up” form in my research.

To put it simply, the Spanish tend to take a light view of the effort involved in coaxing the Spanish bureaucracy over to your side. The gulf between the perceived simplicity of “just show up” and the experiences of others who have been through the process could just about swallow up Nebraska. Despite my repeated questions to consulate staff about a form, or a checklist, or even an example of what someone else had provided, I never got past the basic, ‘just show up.” Now that I have the elusive little green residency card in hand, I think I should frame that statement. Or, at least, figure out how to say it in Spanish.

Suggesting the process is as simple as “just show up” is worthy of a Nobel prize for understatement. To be honest, part of the challenge came with selecting a local company to assist that turned out to be far less voiced in the nuances of navigating the Spanish bureaucracy than we had hoped. But, regardless, it’s more marathon than sprint to reach this finish line.

It really boils down to a matter of interpretation. If I’ve learned anything of Spain so far, it’s that they don’t like to be too precise with the rules. Residency guidelines, for example, state that you have to have health insurance, but there’s no clarity on exactly what that entails. Bottom line, the sly smile gracing the face of the Spanish bureaucrat on the other side of the desk is likely not inspired by his memories of meeting a cute girl from your home country. No, it’s more likely a sign of things to come.

For brevity, I won’t recount the many hours invested in generating a stack of papers attesting to my wellbeing/financial worthiness/general dependability and lack of toe fungus, nor the multiple trips to fun spots like the Spanish treasury, local town hall and American consulate. The real fun in the process begins with an appointment at the police station, which is rather ironic since the whole point of obtaining residency was to avoid ending up in the police station.

The cop shop is an excellent example of one of Spain’s favorite pastimes: lining up. The queue is revered here as the answer to, well, the answer to getting an answer, no matter the question. In fact, for residency, the mandatory appointment is really just an imaginary queue to get you in the front door, so you can then get a ticket to wait for the proper queue. As it was explained to me, this process is a recent advancement on the previous norm, where you would take a ticket to get in a line for the right to get a ticket to get into a line to get a ticket to get into the line where you could then ask your question. The mind boggles.

My hopes of experiencing “just show up” were dashed quickly in this first visit when my new bureaucrat best friend showed very little interest in my paperwork and quite an exaggerated desire to join his workmates on their morning coffee and smoke break. I was unceremoniously dismissed in short order with a demand to deliver a health insurance policy without co-pays. Although it’s not in the guidelines, it was his interpretation of the cryptic requirement to have insurance, or just an easy way to quickly join his mates over a steaming cup of java.

Despite this setback, I still had optimism going into round two a few weeks later with a new health policy in hand. I had no idea of the curious adventure the next three hours would deliver. A highlight reel would include a great deal of queuing, a mad rush to an internet café to print out 40 pages of insurance legalese that I guarantee no one will ever read, coaxing a bank teller to stamp an account statement to make sure it wasn’t fake and, after all the paperwork was deemed sufficient, still being sent away yet again because the process calls for the small application fee to be paid only at a bank, despite the fact it’s going to the office we were already standing in.

Each time we bounced in and out of the police station, the various queues got longer and I was left with more time to reflect on the experience. It was clearly apparent that my case was not an exception. In fact, there was a small herd of us in this scavenger hunt for residency, each paying penance by queuing multiple times, departing to check a box somewhere else and then returning to await the welcoming “bing” as our number was called yet again. Even more oddly is the randomness, as each bing summons you to a different bureaucrat who reviews the paperwork from scratch, raising the chilling thought that they may find a completely different red flag that re-starts the whole queue all over again.

It’s all a mad dash until that fateful moment when the mythic little green card suddenly appears from the printer, followed by an understated flourish of hands as it’s popped from its paper cradle and delivered. And that’s that. The marathon is done. The finish line achieved. I showed up.

RANDOM THOUGHTS: Maybe it’s an LA thing or maybe it’s just me, but isn’t Wayne Gretzky rapidly descending into Bruce Jenner’s creepy aging territory. He’s starting to look like he came out of a pod… It doesn’t strike me as flattering in the new JCPenney television ads that they flash the words HUGE SALE on the screen just as the camera is zooming in on a women’s rear end. Interesting editing, indeed…