When we last left our hero, she was shuffling away from the foreigner police office in Rakovnik, her tears of despair mixing with the cold rain that was pelting her and her friend. That was me, about three months ago. For those of you haven’t been following the story so far, I’d just been told that despite having called weeks in advance to ask what paperwork was needed for the application, my information was wrong, my paperwork was incomplete, and it was unlikely I’d be able to get everything together in time for the deadline.
Apologies for leaving it at such a cliffhanger. Life catches up with you sometimes and you forget that you have a blog. It’s time to finally summarize what happened after that.
The following Monday, the gracious, generous, kind-hearted friend accompanied me back to Kladno to obtain the necessary papers from the social and trade offices. As usual, the process at the social office was so easy I thought I might have dreamed it. The trade office (živnostenský úřad), however, was not so simple.
After you’ve visited the trade office once, the same person must handle your paperwork every time you return. In the case of a foreigner, this is relatively frequent, since visas expire and several papers must be filed each time. In my case, I had the office worker from hell in charge of my case.
The first time I visited this office, I took a Czech-speaking friend with me. The woman was kind, friendly, polite, and helpful. The second time, the friend was unavailable, so I brought a piece of paper with what I needed written on it in Czech and a phone to call a friend to translate if necessary. I might as well have showed up and demanded that the woman deal with me in Chinese, because she was extremely pissed off at my inability to immediately understand every word she spat out rapid-fire when she refused to speak slowly or simply. Eventually I got my friend on the phone and he told me that she basically just wanted to yell at me for not having a translator, and actually she didn’t need anything from me at all. Ever since then, I’ve always brought a translator, but she never forgave me for being foreign, and now every time I visit she tries to find a mistake in my paperwork that would give her the right to reject my application.
It was a different friend with me this time, and one who had never experienced the hate of this state worker before. After drilling me on the details of where I lived and what my job was and not managing to find any inconsistencies, she begrudgingly gave me the letter I needed for the foreigner police. She then pointed out that if I didn’t return in 3 weeks to claim the extension to my business license, she would throw out my file and I’d have to start over from scratch.
On the way out, I had to dissuade my friend from pissing on the building – only because a security guard was watching us.
The insurance receipt was easy enough, still tucked away in my insurance folder (you learn not to throw away anything with a stamp on it in this country, especially official receipts). As for the bank statement, it was easy to get, but they charged me 300 kc for the privilege of putting a stamp on it (see my earlier post on Stamps). Finally, without time to return to Rakovnik to submit my paperwork in person, I made color copies of all 4 items for myself and sent the originals, along with a letter from my boss explaining that I had only been working there for two months but they were very happy with me and expected me to continue working there for several years at my current rate of pay or higher (stamped with an official school stamp of course), to the foreigner police by registered mail.
Just before Christmas I asked my boss to call the office to make sure they had received the paperwork and that everything was in order. They had, they said, and everything looked okay, except (EXCEPT!!???) where was my insurance contract?
My boss and I both took deep breaths and calmly asked what in the hell they were talking about. No one had ever mentioned an insurance contract. They said the insurance card and the receipt were enough. They were very specific about that. The woman on the phone, exasperated, inquired how they were expected to make sure the insurance was sufficient if they didn’t have the contract to read through? The good news was that I could bring the contract when I came to pick up my temporary visa, no more than 1 week before the expiration of my current one (January 14), and everything else looked fine.
Finally, on Wednesday, 11 January, the kind friend accompanied me on one last trip to Rakovnik to get the temporary visa. The line was short and the process didn’t take long. After copying my insurance contract, the woman actually smiled a smile that wasn’t dipped in venom and said everything looks fine. She even returned the original insurance receipt I had mailed her. She put the glorious green stamp in my passport giving me 3 more months to live here legally and left me with the final step of going back to Kladno to pick up my extended business license.
The bus trip between these two cities is horrendously long, and we were grateful for the walk to the trade office to stretch our legs. Sitting in the hallway outside the office waiting our turn, both of us were on edge. I kept fidgeting and asking stupid questions, and he kept snapping at me to stop talking because I was making him even more tense. Finally we were called in. The mean lady at the desk was disappointed to see that I had successfully obtained the visa, but at this point there was nothing she could do. She handed me the new business license, stamped twice and signed by her, and said “that’s it” in a somewhat less than friendly way.
As we stood up, almost as an afterthought, she added, “you know, you don’t have to come to this office every time you need something done on your license. You can go to any trade office in the country. So if you work in Prague, you can just go to the office there.”
Both my friend and I stopped breathing for a moment and the air became slightly thicker as a fine mist of hate was expelled from our pores. She couldn’t have mentioned this sooner, say, on any of the seven or eight trips I had made here in the past couple years? Forcing robotic smiles, we thanked her for the information and practically ran out of the building.
On the way home, my friend was very angry with me for dragging him to Kladno unnecessarily. We argued for a bit as he insisted I should have done more research to find out I could go to any business office, while I assured him that I had done plenty of research and everyone had always told me I had to go to the office in my place of residence. It must have been a recent change. (Future research confirmed this – the change took place quite recently and in the past it was always necessary to go to your local office.) Finally he accepted my explanation, but despite our success, it was hard to be in a good mood after a day spent dealing with Czech state workers.
So that was almost exactly 3 months ago, and now is the time to renew my temporary visa since, surprise surprise, my long-term application has not yet been approved (and in fact I suspect no one has looked at it at all yet). What fresh hell awaits me this time around? Stay tuned for more updates soon!
Showing posts with label translation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label translation. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Czech Bureaucracy: Obtaining a Long-Stay Residence Permit (Part 3)
You and your friend both get up early and catch the 8:30 bus to Kladno. On the way, you show him all of your paperwork and the list of information the foreigner police had given over the phone, explaining everything so that he can answer any questions necessary later on. Then you try to chat about other things, but it’s hard to keep your mind off the situation. If things don’t go well today, there’s hardly any time left to fix it.
The first stop in Kladno is the social office. You walk into the office, your friend says who you are and what you need, and the woman grabs a document from a bin, asks you to sign it, and hands you your bezdlužnost. Step one: complete. God bless the women at the social office in Kladno.
In fact, let’s all just bow our heads and take a moment to appreciate these amazing ladies. If everyone in the Czech public service was like them, there would never be a problem with paperwork.
Thank you.
The second stop is the finance office. Your form is ready (oh thank god) and you need only sign for it. The woman at the desk is less than friendly and happy, but she doesn’t give you any trouble. You thank her very politely and are on your way.
So far it’s only taken about 30 minutes to get everything done. Unfortunately, you’ve just missed the 9:25 bus to Rakovnik and have a few hours to kill before the next one. Time to get some food and celebrate how smoothly everything has gone so far. Your stress levels have dropped considerably and you have a feeling today is going to go very well. Soon you’ll have your two-year residence card and everything will be okay.
After a nice early lunch and a leisurely stroll through the only nice part of Kladno, you make your way to the bus station and pass the long trip to Rakovnik with conversation completely unrelated to paperwork. It’s a nice day, you’ve got a good feeling, and this will all be over soon.
The police station is in the center of Rakovnik, just a few minutes’ walk from the bus station, but the foreigner police are located somewhat less conveniently. In fact, it’s about a 25-minute walk down a long road with no bus stops, located in a rusted metal building in an industrial park. The police officer at the front window tells you to go on in, and you enter the room where you will spend the rest of the day.
There are a lot more people in here than you expected. All of them appear to be either Vietnamese or Ukrainian. There are two open windows, and a cardboard box with numbers on slips of paper. You get number 32, and they’re already on 29. This should be relatively quick and painless.
An hour goes by. There are no toilets. Only one person is called. It’s not that they seem overwhelmingly busy. Everyone is just sitting around waiting. What are the people behind the window doing? One large woman is staring at a computer screen with a confused look on her face. Two others are chatting, partly about work, and partly about some social event they had both attended. A man walks into their office smiling and starts a friendly chat with one of the women that lasts for what feels like an eternity. Finally, they call number 31.
Your friend goes up to the window and asks if you’re waiting in the right place. Irritatedly, they say yes, now go and sit down. Simultaneously, you think you hear someone call 32, but you’re not sure. Your friend walks back to the window to ask the woman which number she had called. She’s just about ready to throw out number 32 and call 33 when he stops her and says you’re 32. Angry, she demands that you move a little quicker if you don’t want to lose your place.
It’s understandable, really. After all, you’ve only been waiting 90 minutes, and she had to stand at that window for nearly 30 seconds before you got there.
You join your friend at the window with your binder full of paperwork. There is a woman standing there with a smile on her face. It is the smile of a loan shark with a crowbar informing you you’re very late paying back your debt. The smile of a supervillain who has you and your loved ones dangling above a pit of starving wolves. This is the woman who will decide if your paperwork is acceptable or not.
The first problem is your application form. There are some fields left blank, such as “spouse” - since you don’t have one. She gruffly informs your translator that you must write “nemá” in each of these fields.
No problem, you say. Right away. So sorry for the mistake. You never stop smiling.
While you’re doing that, she rifles through the rest of the papers. “What’s this?” she says, as though she had discovered a dead rat right in the middle of the pile. She’s pointing at your work contract. Your friend explains that the work contract is part of your reason to stay in this country, along with your business license, and also proof of income, since it states your monthly salary. She stares at you for a moment as though he had just told her that YOU were the one leaving flaming bags of dog poo on her porch every Tuesday for the past six months, then sighs and shrugs. She’ll have to discuss it with her colleague. She walks away from the window into the office. You can plainly see and hear her chatting with another one of the women. They are not discussing your case. They laugh at some private joke, then she walks out of the office entirely.
Several minutes later she returns, a look of triumph on her face. No, they cannot accept your work contract as proof of income. You must also provide a bank statement demonstrating for AT LEAST the past three months that you are actually getting paid this amount.
But you only started the job two months ago.
Well, that’s not her problem, is it?
Anyway, the business license is completely unacceptable. It expires on the same day as your current visa. You tell her of course it does - they won’t extend it until you have a new visa. She looks at you again with a whole new expression of annoyance. Maybe she misheard - did you accidentally just tell her that shirt makes her look fat? You’re pretty sure you didn’t.
She takes a deep breath. It’s clear that she’s very tired of having to explain this to you. How is it that you haven’t psychically taken the information from her brain by now and saved her the trouble? But she’s a patient woman, and she manages to explain to you with almost complete calmness that you must first go to the business office in Kladno and apply to extend your license. They will give you a letter stating that you have applied for it, which you must then give to the foreigner police to prove that you’re really going to do it. Until they have that, there’s no way they can even consider your application.
But being the kind-hearted woman she is, she will look through the rest of your papers to make sure they’re all in order. The bezdlužnost from the finance office is fine. So is the one from the social office. But where is the proof you’ve paid your social insurance?
Well now you’re truly confused. Isn’t that what the bezdlužnost is? It’s a document stating that you don’t owe any money. If you don’t owe any money, then you must have paid your social insurance, right?
The woman reacts to this bit of logic as though you’d tried to prove that the Easter Bunny is real and living in a condo in southern France. She shakes it off like a blow to the head and repeats, you need a paper from the social office listing each and every payment you’ve made.
It is around this point that your friend turns to you and says, still smiling and in the calmest of tones, that this woman is not making any sense whatsoever (even in Czech), and that her attitude is making him want to punch a hole through the wall. You need to hurry up and finish as quickly as possible so he can go outside, scream, and smoke an entire pack of cigarettes.
I’m going to step back a moment now and simply summarize the rest of the encounter, because you’re getting the idea, and to continue to write it out in such detail might trigger an attack of PTSD. Of the documents you were told by phone to bring for your application, more than half of them are unacceptable and many are missing. Your lease is fine as proof of accommodation and the bezdlužnost papers are fine. Your application form is now okay. Your work contract will be considered as part of the application but you need the official bank statement. Your insurance card is good, but you also need to provide “proof of payment” for your insurance - meaning your receipt from the purchase. (The implication here is that people are going around forging insurance cards, but that it would be impossible to forge a receipt with a stamp on it.) Your business license is useless and you must go to Kladno to apply for the extension. You need to visit the social office and get a stamped paper listing all the social security payments you’ve made.
So the complete list, now, of what you still need, is:
1. letter from the business office declaring you have applied to extend your business license
2. official list of social security payments
3. receipt of payment for health insurance
4. stamped bank statement proving your income
You write this all out neatly on a piece of paper and show her, and she confirms that if you bring these four things, your application will be complete. Your friend politely asks how it’s possible that when you called weeks ago, they gave you completely different information. Her face turns angry and she insists that this is not possible - you must have called the wrong office, or misunderstood what you were told, because this office does not make mistakes.
Of course not.
Regarding the matter of temporary extension for your visa, there is another problem. Once your application is officially submitted in its entirety, they will give you a temporary visa extension for up to three months while they process you (and then you have to go to the business office to get a similar extension for your business license), but they won’t give you this until there are no more than seven days left on your visa. So you’ll have to come back again and spend another day here waiting in line just for that.
The biggest problem now is not that you will have to miss more work, but that you are rapidly running out of time. It’s only the middle of December, and you have until the last day of the month, but in a week and a half it will be Christmas and everything will be closed. You won’t have a chance to visit the business office in Kladno until Monday, and Christmas is the following weekend. If they say they require a week to process your request to extend your business license (as they typically do), or if the social office requires time to provide your list of payments, you’ll simply be out of luck. If you had known about these requirements, you would have had these documents already - but it doesn’t matter that you called them, asked what you needed, and they gave you the wrong information. It’s still on you to find a way to make this work. And let’s not even think about how you’re going to deal with this proof of income. It’s too much to process right now.
Appropriately enough, when you finally leave the office, the weather has changed from sunny and warm to pouring rain, strong winds, and near-freezing temperatures. Couldn’t make this stuff up.
This mess is so far from over.
The first stop in Kladno is the social office. You walk into the office, your friend says who you are and what you need, and the woman grabs a document from a bin, asks you to sign it, and hands you your bezdlužnost. Step one: complete. God bless the women at the social office in Kladno.
In fact, let’s all just bow our heads and take a moment to appreciate these amazing ladies. If everyone in the Czech public service was like them, there would never be a problem with paperwork.
Thank you.
The second stop is the finance office. Your form is ready (oh thank god) and you need only sign for it. The woman at the desk is less than friendly and happy, but she doesn’t give you any trouble. You thank her very politely and are on your way.
So far it’s only taken about 30 minutes to get everything done. Unfortunately, you’ve just missed the 9:25 bus to Rakovnik and have a few hours to kill before the next one. Time to get some food and celebrate how smoothly everything has gone so far. Your stress levels have dropped considerably and you have a feeling today is going to go very well. Soon you’ll have your two-year residence card and everything will be okay.
After a nice early lunch and a leisurely stroll through the only nice part of Kladno, you make your way to the bus station and pass the long trip to Rakovnik with conversation completely unrelated to paperwork. It’s a nice day, you’ve got a good feeling, and this will all be over soon.
The police station is in the center of Rakovnik, just a few minutes’ walk from the bus station, but the foreigner police are located somewhat less conveniently. In fact, it’s about a 25-minute walk down a long road with no bus stops, located in a rusted metal building in an industrial park. The police officer at the front window tells you to go on in, and you enter the room where you will spend the rest of the day.
There are a lot more people in here than you expected. All of them appear to be either Vietnamese or Ukrainian. There are two open windows, and a cardboard box with numbers on slips of paper. You get number 32, and they’re already on 29. This should be relatively quick and painless.
An hour goes by. There are no toilets. Only one person is called. It’s not that they seem overwhelmingly busy. Everyone is just sitting around waiting. What are the people behind the window doing? One large woman is staring at a computer screen with a confused look on her face. Two others are chatting, partly about work, and partly about some social event they had both attended. A man walks into their office smiling and starts a friendly chat with one of the women that lasts for what feels like an eternity. Finally, they call number 31.
Your friend goes up to the window and asks if you’re waiting in the right place. Irritatedly, they say yes, now go and sit down. Simultaneously, you think you hear someone call 32, but you’re not sure. Your friend walks back to the window to ask the woman which number she had called. She’s just about ready to throw out number 32 and call 33 when he stops her and says you’re 32. Angry, she demands that you move a little quicker if you don’t want to lose your place.
It’s understandable, really. After all, you’ve only been waiting 90 minutes, and she had to stand at that window for nearly 30 seconds before you got there.
You join your friend at the window with your binder full of paperwork. There is a woman standing there with a smile on her face. It is the smile of a loan shark with a crowbar informing you you’re very late paying back your debt. The smile of a supervillain who has you and your loved ones dangling above a pit of starving wolves. This is the woman who will decide if your paperwork is acceptable or not.
The first problem is your application form. There are some fields left blank, such as “spouse” - since you don’t have one. She gruffly informs your translator that you must write “nemá” in each of these fields.
No problem, you say. Right away. So sorry for the mistake. You never stop smiling.
While you’re doing that, she rifles through the rest of the papers. “What’s this?” she says, as though she had discovered a dead rat right in the middle of the pile. She’s pointing at your work contract. Your friend explains that the work contract is part of your reason to stay in this country, along with your business license, and also proof of income, since it states your monthly salary. She stares at you for a moment as though he had just told her that YOU were the one leaving flaming bags of dog poo on her porch every Tuesday for the past six months, then sighs and shrugs. She’ll have to discuss it with her colleague. She walks away from the window into the office. You can plainly see and hear her chatting with another one of the women. They are not discussing your case. They laugh at some private joke, then she walks out of the office entirely.
Several minutes later she returns, a look of triumph on her face. No, they cannot accept your work contract as proof of income. You must also provide a bank statement demonstrating for AT LEAST the past three months that you are actually getting paid this amount.
But you only started the job two months ago.
Well, that’s not her problem, is it?
Anyway, the business license is completely unacceptable. It expires on the same day as your current visa. You tell her of course it does - they won’t extend it until you have a new visa. She looks at you again with a whole new expression of annoyance. Maybe she misheard - did you accidentally just tell her that shirt makes her look fat? You’re pretty sure you didn’t.
She takes a deep breath. It’s clear that she’s very tired of having to explain this to you. How is it that you haven’t psychically taken the information from her brain by now and saved her the trouble? But she’s a patient woman, and she manages to explain to you with almost complete calmness that you must first go to the business office in Kladno and apply to extend your license. They will give you a letter stating that you have applied for it, which you must then give to the foreigner police to prove that you’re really going to do it. Until they have that, there’s no way they can even consider your application.
But being the kind-hearted woman she is, she will look through the rest of your papers to make sure they’re all in order. The bezdlužnost from the finance office is fine. So is the one from the social office. But where is the proof you’ve paid your social insurance?
Well now you’re truly confused. Isn’t that what the bezdlužnost is? It’s a document stating that you don’t owe any money. If you don’t owe any money, then you must have paid your social insurance, right?
The woman reacts to this bit of logic as though you’d tried to prove that the Easter Bunny is real and living in a condo in southern France. She shakes it off like a blow to the head and repeats, you need a paper from the social office listing each and every payment you’ve made.
It is around this point that your friend turns to you and says, still smiling and in the calmest of tones, that this woman is not making any sense whatsoever (even in Czech), and that her attitude is making him want to punch a hole through the wall. You need to hurry up and finish as quickly as possible so he can go outside, scream, and smoke an entire pack of cigarettes.
I’m going to step back a moment now and simply summarize the rest of the encounter, because you’re getting the idea, and to continue to write it out in such detail might trigger an attack of PTSD. Of the documents you were told by phone to bring for your application, more than half of them are unacceptable and many are missing. Your lease is fine as proof of accommodation and the bezdlužnost papers are fine. Your application form is now okay. Your work contract will be considered as part of the application but you need the official bank statement. Your insurance card is good, but you also need to provide “proof of payment” for your insurance - meaning your receipt from the purchase. (The implication here is that people are going around forging insurance cards, but that it would be impossible to forge a receipt with a stamp on it.) Your business license is useless and you must go to Kladno to apply for the extension. You need to visit the social office and get a stamped paper listing all the social security payments you’ve made.
So the complete list, now, of what you still need, is:
1. letter from the business office declaring you have applied to extend your business license
2. official list of social security payments
3. receipt of payment for health insurance
4. stamped bank statement proving your income
You write this all out neatly on a piece of paper and show her, and she confirms that if you bring these four things, your application will be complete. Your friend politely asks how it’s possible that when you called weeks ago, they gave you completely different information. Her face turns angry and she insists that this is not possible - you must have called the wrong office, or misunderstood what you were told, because this office does not make mistakes.
Of course not.
Regarding the matter of temporary extension for your visa, there is another problem. Once your application is officially submitted in its entirety, they will give you a temporary visa extension for up to three months while they process you (and then you have to go to the business office to get a similar extension for your business license), but they won’t give you this until there are no more than seven days left on your visa. So you’ll have to come back again and spend another day here waiting in line just for that.
The biggest problem now is not that you will have to miss more work, but that you are rapidly running out of time. It’s only the middle of December, and you have until the last day of the month, but in a week and a half it will be Christmas and everything will be closed. You won’t have a chance to visit the business office in Kladno until Monday, and Christmas is the following weekend. If they say they require a week to process your request to extend your business license (as they typically do), or if the social office requires time to provide your list of payments, you’ll simply be out of luck. If you had known about these requirements, you would have had these documents already - but it doesn’t matter that you called them, asked what you needed, and they gave you the wrong information. It’s still on you to find a way to make this work. And let’s not even think about how you’re going to deal with this proof of income. It’s too much to process right now.
Appropriately enough, when you finally leave the office, the weather has changed from sunny and warm to pouring rain, strong winds, and near-freezing temperatures. Couldn’t make this stuff up.
This mess is so far from over.
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