Some years ago, I needed to get an visa for urgent travel to China, a process that required me to fly down to SF and stand in a very long line at the Chinese consulate.
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@dan Jen once needed a special cultural exchange visa to go work in a hospital in China. Getting it required _5_ trips to the consulate in New York, each time being sent away to come back with a more significant seal from the inviting institution.
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Some years ago, I needed to get an visa for urgent travel to China, a process that required me to fly down to SF and stand in a very long line at the Chinese consulate. When I finally handed the woman there my forms, she promptly stamped them and said "you need to take these to Window 2", pointing around the corner. So I walked around the corner...
...where *the same woman* swiveled her chair around and proceeded to check the stamp that she had just applied.
I would have been annoyed if I wasn't in so much awe at discovering the purest form of bureaucracy.
@dan In 2006 I was in Hungary and needed to buy medicinal alcohol in a pharmacy. The receipt specified the prices of the bottle, the alcohol and the cap.
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@dan I hope she was pulling two wages for that
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Some years ago, I needed to get an visa for urgent travel to China, a process that required me to fly down to SF and stand in a very long line at the Chinese consulate. When I finally handed the woman there my forms, she promptly stamped them and said "you need to take these to Window 2", pointing around the corner. So I walked around the corner...
...where *the same woman* swiveled her chair around and proceeded to check the stamp that she had just applied.
I would have been annoyed if I wasn't in so much awe at discovering the purest form of bureaucracy.
@dan it's kind of beautiful in its efficient inefficiency
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Some years ago, I needed to get an visa for urgent travel to China, a process that required me to fly down to SF and stand in a very long line at the Chinese consulate. When I finally handed the woman there my forms, she promptly stamped them and said "you need to take these to Window 2", pointing around the corner. So I walked around the corner...
...where *the same woman* swiveled her chair around and proceeded to check the stamp that she had just applied.
I would have been annoyed if I wasn't in so much awe at discovering the purest form of bureaucracy.
@dan@discuss.systems That's fucking hilarious tbh
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@irene @ricci @steve @dan I have an old passport with a page where one side is a Russian VISA and the other a Chinese VISA, fun to show up in Washington DC with that
Proper bureacracy was described in the 1976 edition of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Tasks_of_Asterix - “The Place that Sends you Mad”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dO9Lm_CXz0 (could not find an english edition 1,2,3, but has english subs
-- original was french/dutch/german -
@irene @ricci @steve @dan I have an old passport with a page where one side is a Russian VISA and the other a Chinese VISA, fun to show up in Washington DC with that
Proper bureacracy was described in the 1976 edition of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Tasks_of_Asterix - “The Place that Sends you Mad”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dO9Lm_CXz0 (could not find an english edition 1,2,3, but has english subs
-- original was french/dutch/german -
@dan I hope she was pulling two wages for that
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Some years ago, I needed to get an visa for urgent travel to China, a process that required me to fly down to SF and stand in a very long line at the Chinese consulate. When I finally handed the woman there my forms, she promptly stamped them and said "you need to take these to Window 2", pointing around the corner. So I walked around the corner...
...where *the same woman* swiveled her chair around and proceeded to check the stamp that she had just applied.
I would have been annoyed if I wasn't in so much awe at discovering the purest form of bureaucracy.
I had a bureaucrat tell me to leave my document with him so it can be processed and come back next Monday, and when I told him that I couldn't as I was leaving the country, he gave me a weird look, took the document, stamped it and gave it back to me - "done !".
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Some years ago, I needed to get an visa for urgent travel to China, a process that required me to fly down to SF and stand in a very long line at the Chinese consulate. When I finally handed the woman there my forms, she promptly stamped them and said "you need to take these to Window 2", pointing around the corner. So I walked around the corner...
...where *the same woman* swiveled her chair around and proceeded to check the stamp that she had just applied.
I would have been annoyed if I wasn't in so much awe at discovering the purest form of bureaucracy.
@dan This reminds me of the Twelve Tasks of Asterix. One scene was pretty much this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Tasks_of_Asterix -
Some years ago, I needed to get an visa for urgent travel to China, a process that required me to fly down to SF and stand in a very long line at the Chinese consulate. When I finally handed the woman there my forms, she promptly stamped them and said "you need to take these to Window 2", pointing around the corner. So I walked around the corner...
...where *the same woman* swiveled her chair around and proceeded to check the stamp that she had just applied.
I would have been annoyed if I wasn't in so much awe at discovering the purest form of bureaucracy.
Literally they named the language (in English) after the process.
Mandarin is such an art it gets a language.
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Some years ago, I needed to get an visa for urgent travel to China, a process that required me to fly down to SF and stand in a very long line at the Chinese consulate. When I finally handed the woman there my forms, she promptly stamped them and said "you need to take these to Window 2", pointing around the corner. So I walked around the corner...
...where *the same woman* swiveled her chair around and proceeded to check the stamp that she had just applied.
I would have been annoyed if I wasn't in so much awe at discovering the purest form of bureaucracy.
@dan Just two windows? Try to enter/leave Turkmenistan when traveling on a motorcycle. And that with your visa already granted.
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Back in the 1980s, some Italian cafes employed a similar system. As a customer, you'd place your order at one window, and the clerk would give you a receipt/voucher. You'd then step to a second window, and hand over the slip of paper before stepping to a third window where you'd collect your coffee. I recall, though these are hazy old memories, at least one morning where it was the same person at each of the three windows.
Also, I once did the same PRC consulate dance in SF!
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@dan This reminds me of the Twelve Tasks of Asterix. One scene was pretty much this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Tasks_of_Asterix@annehargreaves @dan And here I was thinking that was an exaggeration.
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The Brits take the greatest pride in their bureaucracy -- though the French, Russians, and Byzantine Greeks were tough competitors -- but the Chinese invented it.
@huntingdon @dan The Babylonians and Egyptians dispute who invented Bureacracy
you should have seen the forms required, during construction of the great Pyramid of Cheops, if a stone was delivered to the site and the stone was not in spec
page after page of papyrus
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Back in the 1980s, some Italian cafes employed a similar system. As a customer, you'd place your order at one window, and the clerk would give you a receipt/voucher. You'd then step to a second window, and hand over the slip of paper before stepping to a third window where you'd collect your coffee. I recall, though these are hazy old memories, at least one morning where it was the same person at each of the three windows.
Also, I once did the same PRC consulate dance in SF!
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.