Earth is still going round the sun, and neither the
dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are
able to prevent it.
George Orwell.
I had just arrived at the almazara, which was due to press my
olives and turn them into golden sunshine, or olive oil as I prefer to call it.
But first, the man wanted my NIE
number. I’m a foreigner I said brightly (I look like one too, even wearing a face-mask).
I offered him my Spanish driving licence with my handy NIF impressed on it for some reason in needlessly tiny print.
‘No, I need your address’, he
goes.
So I give him my framed green
A4 letter from extranjería which
normally lives over the bed. Except these days, it’s on the roof-rack. The same
NIF of course, although the address is wrong (it’s from a dozen years ago), but
he’s happy and so therefore I’m happy. Thus goes the administrative minuet.
Paperwork is a vital part of
life. It is, as someone once said, the glue that keeps the wheels of industry
from turning. It’s the key ingredient to amassing sometimes useless
information, and it provides employment to many, who are known here as funcionarios. In English – functionaries,
officials, civil servants, desk-jockeys… something to do with ink anyhow.
‘In the mid-eighteenth
century, the term bureaucracy entered the world
by way of French literature. The neologism was originally forged as a nonsense
term to describe what its creator, political economist Vincent de Gournay,
considered the ridiculous possibility of “rule by office,” or, more literally,
“rule by a desk.” Gournay’s model followed the form of more serious
governmental terms indicating “rule by the best” (aristocracy) and “rule by the
people” (democracy)…’.
But, as we know, it caught
on. In Spain, while no one likes the funcionarios
(there’s a good video here you may have already seen), the truth is, everybody wants
to be one. You get good pay, good benefits (including the eleven o’clock coffee
break), fourteen monthly payments a year and, best of all, you can’t be fired. Become
a funcionario, they say, y tienes la vida solucionada – as if
life itself is a fearsome thing that needs to be tamed.
There are 2.6 million of them, and something must be done to keep them all
relatively busy, hence (and forget the ventanilla
única or the paperless office),
there are endless and incomprehensible forms to be filled out. And if there
aren’t enough, somebody will legislate to create some more. It’s the modern
equivalent to the army kitchen that never stops cooking, cleaning, washing. And
now do it again.
Indeed, the paperwork is
slow, even when correctly filled in: Las
cosas del palacio van despacio say the people, waiting patiently for their
opening permit, or driving licence, or pension: Things move slowly at the palace.
A story this week tells of a person
who had downloaded a form from the ministry website, printed it, filled it in
and taken it to the offices of the Social Security. It was bounced by the
functionary because it was in black and white and not in ministerial yellow and
blue. The anecdote comes from a larger story: ‘of the 837,000 people who have applied for the
minimum wage (IMV) between June and
October, so far only 1.5% of them have been approved and paid’. Slow,
complicated and you need to collect a few more forms, which, in turn, will also
need their own formularios to be
filled out – oh, and signed with a blue biro. Another story, in El País, tells of a woman who has moved to the country to telework from
an old farmhouse and wants to buy a couple of sheep to eat the weeds, because
they are full of ticks. Hah, said the vet, lemme tell you, it’s not that easy…
One’s papers need to be
right, ‘in order’, in case there’s an inspection; to avoid a sanction – a fine.
But life can’t always be reduced
to the printed page and one can easily fall foul of being fuera de la normalidad – like when they want your dabs and you are
missing a finger, or when you only have one surname…
All of which brings us to the
gestorías – those agents that deal
with ‘la administración’ and help get
one’s paperwork done… for a price.
The Local (paywall) has an article which begins ‘In the midst of this pandemic, many people have
been forced to think about changing careers. Perhaps one job which might suit
foreigners living in Spain – and which must pay well from my experience - would
be setting up a business guiding other foreigners through the madness of this
country's bureaucracy.
Think about it for a moment.
If you have ever negotiated your way through this hellish maze, then you will
know how difficult it is…’.
Heh! is my
answer to that. The Spanish are remarkably difficult in allowing foreigners to
push their way into traditionally Spanish professions.
Now my friend at the olive
press wasn’t a bureaucrat; just like the rest of us who must from time to time
help the tax collector or the police or the statisticians, he just had to fill
out some forms before he could press the button to start the process of making
my jugs of oil.