8 Comments
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Bas Grasmayer's avatar

When I bought my new bike to avoid public transport, I didn’t expect it to pay for itself this quickly…

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Andrew Bulkeley's avatar

You just won the Internet for today. Laughing emoji.

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Bas Grasmayer's avatar

I wish I didn’t 🥲

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Chris Wilson's avatar

I had the exact same experience when submitting my citizenship application. The site wanted a Prüfungsbericht (which takes lots of paperwork, weeks of waiting, and costs hundreds of Euros) for my wife as well as for me.

So I contacted the LEA because nothing about that requirement was in the public documentation. They told me to contact Willkommenszentrum Berlin. They had never heard of such a requirement, and basically told me to just upload a PDF of a personal note stating that I will provide such a report if absolutely necessary but that it doesn’t seem to be officially required.

Even the UX of this process has been Kafkaesque.

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Andrew Bulkeley's avatar

It's crazy. How hard is it to make a simple interface to submit a few documents? But I'm glad to hear it - I thought maybe it was me, adding to the Kafka-esque-ness.

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Pedro Moura's avatar

I gave up on BVG and just bought my own car. Go ahead, judge me 😅

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Andrew Bulkeley's avatar

This is Germany. We were judging you even before you bought the car.

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JM's avatar

>"It would have been easier to have actually sent in (faxed?) all the documents than to have used that inane digital interface."

This is often the case. It's a craps shoot if a digital interface is easy and well designed. That depends on many factors (which are subject to change. A digital interface can suddenly become worse with an update.)

The much maligned fax, however, is a digital interface which is always easy and straightforward.

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