Czech Bureaucracy: Obtaining a Long-Stay Residence Permit (Part 2)

Over the next few days, you discuss the situation with your boss, who, having dealt with the government before, is fortunately very understanding and agrees to give you the day off the following Wednesday to retrieve the papers (assuming the offices have them ready in time) and go to the foreigner police in Rakovnik to submit your application at last. This time you take no risks, and employ a Czech friend to do the translation for you. They’re always nicer when you have a native speaker to do the talking.

On Monday, you plan to call both offices (neither of which are open on Tuesday) to check the status of your papers and make sure they’ll be ready in time. The finance office beats you to the punch, however, calling you at 11:00 and rattling off something very complicated-sounding that you are apparently expected to memorize instantly. You ask that they hold on for just a second and pass the phone off to a Czech-speaking colleague who is kind enough to write everything down for you.

She’s gone for a lot longer than you expect. Finally, ten minutes later, she returns with a piece of paper covered in numbers. The first number is 32 - the number of crowns that the finance office claims you owe and must pay before they will issue you the bezdlužnost.

But wait - how could you possibly owe them any money? You’ve only been in the country for four and a half months! You certainly don’t owe any taxes. Well, the woman on the phone had no idea why you owe the money, but until you pay it, they won’t give you the paper.

Lovely. At least it's only a very small amount. So how do you get them this money?

Well, you could go to the office in Kladno and give them the money in person. Of course, they close at 2 pm and it would be physically impossible to get there from here in time. The other option is to make a bank transfer (the other numbers on the paper are the information you need for this) - but it must be from the Czech National Bank, only one branch of which is located in Prague, and which closes at - you guessed it, 2 pm. Peachy.

You have your colleague, who graciously offers to cover for you while you leave a bit early to run to this bank, call the woman back to inform her you’ll be paying by bank transfer and confirm that your paper will be ready on Wednesday. She also tries to call the social office for you, but she encounters nothing but an impenetrable labyrinth of automatic systems, none of which offers any useful advice or, you know, a human being to speak to. You give up, cross your fingers and squeeze your thumbs hoping that all will be well, and rush out the door to the bank.

You make it 15 minutes before they close and have to go through a metal detector to get inside. You take a number and, after a few minutes of searching, manage to find the forms for making a payment to the finance office. The form is indecipherable, however, and even the Czechs waiting their turn are helping each other figure out what to write in each field. Fortunately, the average Czech citizen is considerably more friendly and helpful than most government workers, and one of them speaks enough English to help you out. You fill it in as best you can and pray to whichever gods might be listening that you’ve done it properly.

You watch each person approach the window and try to pay. Each of them is up there for a distressingly long time, and each has to answer questions and make adjustments to their paperwork. Finally, it’s your turn. You hand the woman the form and the money. She punches something into a computer then hands you a receipt. That’s it, she says.

That was suspiciously easy.

How sad is it that when something goes smoothly, your first instinct is to suspect that you've done something wrong?

Now there’s nothing left to do but wait until Wednesday and hope that everything goes well.

Stamps

The trouble with making stamp ink from unicorn blood is that they are so commonly needed, but unicorn blood is so very rare. While it's true that only a drop of the blood is needed for each vat of ink, the price of even such a small amount is so high that it becomes astoundingly expensive to get even a single rubber-stamp on any official document.

In the government offices the cost is partially subsidized, of course, so the price is usually only about 100 kč, but in the private sector, such as banks, it can be much higher. For example, I myself was just yesterday in my friendly neighborhood branch of Raiffeisen, where my paychecks are deposited each month, and I needed an official printed bank statement for the foreigner police with a stamp on it to prove I hadn't forged it. I knew that such a service could hardly be free, what with the cost of that single sheet of paper, the power to run the printer, and the eighteen seconds that the clerk at the desk had to work to print it out for me, but I had forgotten to take into account the unicorn blood in the stamp. The woman told me that I could print one for free from my online banking page, but if I wanted that stamp, it was going to be 300 kč.

Alas, I don't see what other choice the bank had other than to charge me the full cost of the ink in that stamp - especially since she had to use it twice, stamping both sides of the paper.

Perhaps the solution is that the government stop mandating that all stamps contain traces of unicorn blood. No one likes the fees that banks have to charge for each small service rendered, least of all the bank owners themselves, but as long as this prohibitive regulation is enforced, what else can they do?