Official Patience

 

Usually, when dealing with Spanish bureaucracy, the real pain starts when you are dealing with a person on the other side of the desk who asks you for a form, paper or document that you did not know that you had to have.  It turns out that this document (that you did not know that you had to have) is essential.  Is obviously essential.  Patently.  At least to the person sitting opposite you.  And their weary disbelief at your lack of appreciation for the missing piece of paper is palpable.  And nothing can or will be done until the paper is produced.

     Sometimes you have the document that is necessary, but you failed to bring a copy of that document and then things fall apart and the centre cannot hold and you have to depart and come back another day.  This actually happened to me.

     I hadn’t be asked to provide a copy of anything, so the demand for one came out of the blue somewhat.  And I reasoned that, if a copy was required then surely it would be simpler all round if the official opposite me made a copy on the photocopier that I could see in another part of the office. 

     So, I gently suggested, “Would it be possible for you to make a copy here?”

     “We are not a photocopy shop!”  I was told in disgust.

     I had to search around for a place to make a copy before I could return.

     Today, to be fair the major problem was not what happened in the office but how I got an appointment in the first place.

     To renew my residency document, I needed to make an appointment in the section of the police department specifically dealing with documentation for foreigners.  The appointments are made online and they are virtually impossible to get.  No matter how and when you try, you fail.  At first, you put the failure down to bad luck, but then after a couple of weeks of trying you begin to get just a little bit panicky because the expiry date on your card is getting closer.  But you’ve left plenty of time and so you try again, expanding the location of the offices that you can use.  And you fail.

     And your card expires and you are no further forward in getting an appointment.  Then your bank informs you that your residency card is no longer in date and that will effect your ability to have a working bank account!

     A desperate visit to the bank later and fears are partially assuaged by the dismissal by the teller of immanent rejection, assuring me that as long as I am making an effort to get it renewed there will be nothing to worry about.

     But I did worry and so decided to go to a lawyer or notary and pay if necessary.  The lawyers I spoke to were not encouraging, but one of them “had a friend” who might be able to help.  A phone call later and I was informed that an appointment could be provided at a cost of 100 euros.  For a supposedly free appointment.

     This “selling” of appointments is a recognized scandal, it was even featured on a television documentary a few days ago, and nothing is done.

     My 100-euro appointment was for the very precise time of 12.09 pm, a time I was to discover was more conceptual rather than related to temporal reality.  I arrived early, queued firstly in the wrong queue and was then redirected to another queue and had to pass through a metal detector, which I failed but was waved through by the young police officer and made my way down to the office that was going to deal with my application.

     My name was ticked off a list and I was given a numbered ticket which was some 30 numbers ahead of the number being dealt with.

     Despair gave way to the Kindle on my phone, and I was content. Apart from the fact that the person dealing with my case also seemed to be the fountain of documental wisdom and was consulted by all and sundry, my application was speedy.  And in spite of the traffic-filled roads on the way back, there were no real hold ups and as I may not have a new card yet, I do have a receipt that explains that one is on its way. 

     A result.  And we went for a menu del dia to celebrate!

 

Computing really is a blood sport!

 

This morning I attempted to work out when it was that I first owned a ‘reasonable’ personal computer.  I had a sort of access to a machine when I started teaching in the 1970’s, but in those far off days, the computer was limited to one to a school – and in the school I was teaching in, it was in the jealous safekeeping of the Maths department, and ‘lesser breeds’ (i.e., non-mathematicians) access was somewhat limited.

     In Cardiff in the very early 80’s I was gifted a hand-held Sinclair machine, and by the mid 1980’s I had bought my own Sinclair QL.

 

     The QL remains the only computer that I have owned that has literally reduced me to tears as a long and graphically complex document that I was typing out to an external deadline was almost wholly lost when the keyboard froze.  In those distant computer times, when the digital world was yet young, a page of A4 could take over a minute to ‘save’, so you tended not to and usually you were lucky, and you could mark the completion of your computer typing by having a celebratory ‘save’.  Usually lucky, but not always.

     On that unforgettable occasion I had to retype everything that I had done and eventually went to bed in the late-early hours of the morning.  Slept for 30 minutes.  Got up to go to work.  Had a rough day.

     Given that I have had almost 40 years of computer experience (as user not programmer) and have lived through the trauma of the various versions of Windows, you would think that I have become digital savvy.  But no.

     I say this because I spent virtually the whole of the morning after I returned having completed my early swim, looking at a blank, or near blank, computer screen.

     The fault, I have to admit is mine.  I am sometimes sloppy in the way that I leave my computer at the end of the day.  Some things I close meticulously, but other documents and suchlike I tend to leave lurking on a variety of screens, as I tap the sleep button and depart.

     Usually, of course, this means little as my work from the previous day is there ready for me to edit or ignore with a tap of a finger and the writing of a password.  Except.

     Except when the computer tells me that it needs to update.  I suppose, like most people, I tap the ‘update later’ choice and usually plump for ‘Try tonight’ when I’m in bed for the machine to do what it needs to do. 

     And this is where my digital slovenliness comes back to byte me.

     For me, my computer is little more than a glorified typewriter.  Certainly, anyone listening to the way that I thump the electronic keys would be able to tell that I have not lost the techniques that I learned from my typewriter classes in Colchester Avenue in Cardiff on actual typewriters.   

 

So, most of my work on the computer is in Word, and I am usually working on more than one document at the time, and I like to have easy access, so I leave the documents on the active screens of the computer, and I don’t close them.

     Usually this doesn’t matter.  Except when I’ve clicked the ‘Try later tonight’ button for a system upgrade.  What happens then is that the Upload tries to upload, gets to a certain point, and then finds that there are open documents, and the process needs to know what I want to do with these documents, but I’m in bed, asleep.  So, the Upload stops, until I open the computer and am faced with questions and directions.

     I, of course, save the documents and then watch helplessly as Upload starts up, and what should have happened in the dark hours of inactivity, now happens when I have things to do in the daylight.

     This has happened more than once, and I am always being caught out.  It is because the clicking of the ‘Try later tonight’ is a case of ‘once clicked, soonest forgotten’ and by the time I come to close the system down, it has slipped my mind that the computer will reactivate itself hours and hours later.

     It seems to me that it should not be beyond the powers of the insanely powerful chips and programs that we play with today that, if you have, however quickly and thoughtlessly, programmed an Update, there should be a message when you try and turn the computer off or if you ask it to sleep, to remind you that all other programs should be closed if you don’t want to waste half a day in the daylight!

     I can remember on previous machines that I would sometimes get a “Are you sure you want to do that?” message on the screen which would, almost invariably make me pause and instinctively say, “No!  I don’t!  What am I doing?”  Computers do make it ridiculously easy to be intimidating.

 

     I remember on one of my early Apple computers, you would get an occasional “FATAL SYSTEM ERROR!” and a graphic of an old-fashioned spherical bomb with a fizzing fuse, which would panic me instantly!

     The only good thing about not doing digital things properly nowadays is that you waste time, whereas previously you could do severe programming damage to the future running of your machine.

     Perhaps this is the time that I learn to link my easy Update delay with tidy digital housekeeping.  Though I doubt it!  All computer users have to be masochistic to a degree, it is the price we pay for the wealth that sophisticated programs give.

     No pain, no gain.  That is the motto, and an article of belief in the digital world!