On Bureacracy

September 1, 2006 - 7:02 PM by Sarah

First, the Good News. Imshin has written a quite amusing post, about her many bureaucratic misadventures with Israel’s infamous Ministry of the Interior, when she was growing up. I can’t reprint the whole thing here, but to give you a taste: When she immigrated as a little girl, they marked her down as a boy by mistake. The drama grows from there. Still, she says, with all the trips she had to make to their offices, at least she became an expert on how to get a good place in line, so as to be in and out as quickly as possible.

However, as many, more recent, immigrants have noticed, things have, indeed, improved at the Misrad Hapnim (Interior Ministry). Imshin happily has discovered this for herself:

Youngest needed a new passport. You can do a great many things by mail these days, which i had been doing, but not a passport for a child. You have to go and I really didn’t fancy going.

For one thing, I didn’t have thefaintest idea where it was. The main office used to be in the Shalom Tower, but it had moved to some new-fangled government building near Azrielli, or so I’d heard. But how to get there? Where to park? And most importantly – what the procedure was to get a decent number?

I couldn’t take the uncertainty of it all.

In the end, time ran out. The summer vacation was nearing to its end and Youngest still didn’t have her passport. I would just have to go and brave it.

Bish, having given up trying to explain where it was (I now know I actually drive passed it every day on my latest route home from work), suggested I solve the two first questions by taking a taxi there. Good idea. Now how early did I have to get there? I told Youngest to expect to get up at six. I was aiming at being there at seven. Luckily, we were really late and ended up getting there only at ten to eight.

The queue in front of us for the security check seemed endless. I thought we’d be hours, but when they started letting people through the metal detectors at about two minutes to eight, most of the queue was apparently not waiting for the Population Administration department of Misrad Hapnim, and didn’t show up at the next queue – the one leading to the Information window, where we were to receive our much coveted number (I’d already downloaded the form from the Internet, and filled it in at home. Such bliss is life in the modern world).

In the end, we were an amazing number 9 in the queue. The whole process was quite pleasant, all things considered and relatively speaking. Nice new plastic chairs, a nice civilized electronic noticeboard telling you what number was being served and which booth to go to. All in all – a far cry from those horrible wooden grey benches of yesteryear. And it was all extremely efficient. They even accepted (= preferred) payment by credit card.

By 8:30am we were out and ready to go shopping in Azrielli.

Unfortunately, Azrielli wasn’t ready for us at such an ungodly hour, and we were forced to invest in breakfast!

So who said Israeli bureaucracy was bad? If you’ve ever had to wait hours at the British Council in Tel Aviv, you will definitely want to kiss the clerk next time you are in our Misrad Hapnim! (Try to control yourself, though. These days it’s not a good idea going around kissing people.)

Now, the Bad News, this heartbreaking tale by Yael:

I finally got myself over to the hospital administrative place to pay my 35 shekels to get a copy of the forms that I need to get the form 17 before I get sued. Actually, I am already being sued. To stop the suing process. Heh. Remember waaaaayyy back last October when I broke my collarbone falling down the stairs and had the great medical experience? Then remember when they called me in like March, told me I needed to go get form 17 and left me with a number to call back in case of problems? And then how after hours waiting to get the form I was told I needed additional forms and the number they gave me was bogus and I then spent (quite literally) 3-4 hours a day for nearly a week trying to find out how to get (and what to get) the papers I needed to get the form 17….before finally giving up. I figured they’d call me back. Instead they sent a letter telling me I’m being sued. Happily they also gave information about exactly what I needed and (miracle of miracles!) exactly where to go to get it. Unhappily, they don’t actually keep the hours they claim…But today they were where they said they would be, they were nice (yes, actually really quite nice, with each of the 3 people who’d helped me get to the person who really helped me stopping me on my way out, asking was everything ok and wishing me a good week. Made me feel bad for all the evil thoughts I’d sent in their direction on Sunday when I got there and found they’d changed their hours in the week since they’d sent the letter… heh.

[PS The timestamp on this post is not exact. The material was not uploaded on Shabbat.]

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