The Rat Race

'Earlier,' he said. 'We need to be there earlier.'

Philippe had the dilated pupils of an animal that has its leg caught in a trap. I half expected him to start gnawing at a limb such was his expression of panic.

I scrolled the numbers back on my phone alarm whilst he looked on.

'No, earlier!' he said. 'You don't understand.'

Maybe I didn't understand but I had certainly heard his tale of woe. Philippe, my partner, landed in Munich a few months ago and as such has been through the five stages of German registration bureaucracy, which has the same progression as those of the Kübler-Ross model of grief. From the way he tells it, Philippe had been through all but the last stage (acceptance) during his trips to the Munich Kreisverwaltungsreferat, the administrative building at which all new city residents must register.

The Kreisverwaltungsreferat (or KVR as it is unaffectionately known) is exactly what you would expect of an governmental institution in the Vaterland. As we lurched out from the subway, bleary-eyed as a result of the earlier-than-early start, KVR loomed above us with its uninspired 60s facade partly shrouded in scaffolding. Ugly buildings don't usually phase me, I grew up in Croydon after all, but KVR was something else altogether. For underneath the blocky architecture, filling the steps in a disorganised mass, a crowd of 100+ people teemed.

And I was about to join them.

'What is this?' I whispered to Philippe, as we shuffled to the back of the crowd. An infant squirming in its pram looked up at me bewildered as I filled the gap next to it. I gazed bewildered back, both of us suddenly finding ourselves in Stage 1 - shock and denial.

'This is nothing,' Philippe muttered, his teeth gritted in anger (already far ahead of me on Stage 2).

Sure enough more people were joining the crowd, packing us in like the terracotta army but much less orderly.

'I can't remember where "K" is,' grimaced Philippe.

I looked at him fearful. Was it too much for him? Had KVR made him lose his mind?

'What?'

'Your surname, it begins with a "K"' he said.

I nodded at him, placing a comforting hand on his arm.

'Each letter has a different kiosk for registration. We need to head to the kiosk as soon as possible to get a ticket to be seen.'

'Okaaaaay,' I said, stretching the syllables out in my incomprehension.

'The longer we leave it the more people are in front in the queue and the longer it takes to be seen. Every second counts!' he exclaimed. 'Just you wait and see.'

Slightly scared now, I spent the remaining time in suspenseful silence, slowly being compressed into pâté by the force of the ever-expanding crowd.

7.30 a.m. and all hell broke lose.

They must have opened the doors to the building because all of a sudden the crowd surged forward taking Philippe, the pram and I with it. With nothing to be seen other than the 360 degrees of faces and bodies in my immediate vicinity I felt Philippe's hand begin to slip out of mine and had a momentary insight into the horror of crush disasters. Pressing en masse, the swell of a few hundred pre-registration Munich residents broke against a set of double doors and in we squished, cheek-against-cheek, calf-against-buggy, staggering into the desolate corridors of the KVR.

And then everyone started running.

I have never seen anything like it. Within moments the multi-headed mass dissolved into a frenzy of faces pinballing through the halls of the KVR.

'I'll go look at the board,' said Philippe, striding ahead, too dignified to join the sprinting hordes.

I hurried after him, bumping into panicked figures along the way.

'What's the matter?' I asked, stricken to see my usually composed partner, swearing under his breath whilst looking at the floorplan.

'Your letter isn't listed.'

I surveyed the board and sure enough, next to "K" someone had crudely obscured the previously listed kiosk with a stretch of duct tape.

What were we supposed to do now? Surely they couldn't just ignore people with surnames beginning with "K," I asked, bargaining my way into Stage 3.

'This is KVR,' said Philippe, his face darkening further. 'They can do anything they want.'

Philippe's worst fears had come true and long lines had formed already. We walked past them, our inquiries as to whether this was the right queue for "K" met with the shrugs of hopelessness. Similarly when we were asked by other lost souls, we shrugged ourselves.

The queue crawled forward and as we came within hearing range of the desk, we were able to tune into the melodrama of KVR counter interactions. I was fully absorbed in a Mexican standoff between a KVR employee and a resident brandishing an incorrectly signed property rental agreement, when Philippe started muttering again.

'This isn't a processing desk, this is an information desk. We have to move. Now.'

Philippe went into Jason Bourne mode, grabbing my hand and pulling me out of the line. Round we scurried, traversing the grey corridors of KVR like rats let loose in a psychologist's maze, only our behaviour was much less rational. Occasionally we would encounter another lost murine with whom we would share a look of mutual self-pity before twitching our whiskers and moving on. 

In the end it didn't matter which queue we joined because KVR, as evidenced by the rat-race chaos of the first few minutes, was a free-for-all. It turned out people with surnames beginning with the letter "K" could be processed at any kiosk, something we found out 30 minutes later when we finally came face-to-face with a KVR employee. 

With the standard issue expression of boredom she gave us a deli-counter ticket with the number 38 stamped on it. Whether waiting for cheese, sausages or governmental bureaucracy, the frustration at the slowly ascending numbers is the same. 

So our long watch began. 

As is only natural I descended into Stage 4, depression, as the red LED display stayed resolutely fixed on number 11. Philippe with his experience, however, seemed to ascend to a transcendental plane, closing his eyes and falling silent, expelling only an occasional deep sigh. Stuck on a slightly less elevated level, I counted the tiles on the ceiling.

During this time I began to see one of the issues of trying to set up a life abroad.  The sticky trappings of bureaucracy and the deli-counter wait may be universal but what makes the grey corridors of KVR different from the aesthetically similar ones of Brighton and Hove County Council is the sensation of being in an unfamiliar country with unknown rules.  Without Philippe's prior experience I can only imagine how much more lost I would have felt.  In a way, his disgruntlement was the ultimate in reassurance. Here was someone who had been there, done that and knew what to despair of.

In the end we made it out of KVR, fleeing with registration documents and tales to bore blog readers with. Having survived trial by KVR, I pushed through to the stage 5, acceptance and hope. I was acclimatizing to German customs. That was until Philippe with an appropriately German touch of Schadenfreude, reminded me that we would have to go through the whole thing again when we moved in a few weeks.

Back to Stage 1 then.