Benign bureaucrats, and the others, online services that sometimes work, and murderous entertainments

The weather suddenly broke. With terrible timing. 

Well, the timing was mine, but it was the weather that made it terrible.

Good time for a bike ride (left)
Not so good (right)

We hugely enjoy living in Spain. The best thing about it is how well the people here have received us. Warm-hearted, kind, friendly. Even the bureaucrats tend to be less painful than in most places. With exceptions, of course. Like the bureaucrat who wouldn’t let Danielle in for an appointment that she’d had to make by phone, because the web service was down.

“You haven’t got the email confirming your appointment.”

“No. Because your colleague made it by phone, since the online service had failed. He’s on the phone now and can confirm it for you.”

“We don’t accept telephone confirmations of appointments.”

“But I couldn’t get any other. Your system was down. That’s not my fault.”

“Sure. But it’s not my problem either.”

Generally, our experience has been far better. Like the woman we met in a tax office. She carefully read the confused and confusing correspondence the central office in Madrid had been sending us, sending letters to our old address in the UK from which they had to be forwarded to us, and then blaming us for the delay. There were threats of all sorts of dire consequences, only to be avoided if we paid a large sum or appeared in person at an address in the capital. Which is 350 km away from where we live in Valencia. 

“Yes. I see the problem,” said the civil servant we were with. “I need to make a call or two. Would you please wait here?”

She went to her desk and had a couple of earnest phone conversations. When she returned she gave us a freshly printed new tax demand for a much reduced figure, for the kind of sum we were expecting to pay.

“That’s sorted,” she explained. She even had a smile for us. “just pay that and the matter will be closed. Sorry you’ve had such a bad time.”

They’re mostly friendly and helpful when you get in front of them. So the problem is to get in front of them. A problem not eased by the move to online services.

Online services are usually good but, sadly, not always. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve gone through a multi-screen process of completing information about myself only to be told, “sorry, your data could not be saved due to a system error”. 

I’ve recently had to register some information about the car. Everything went swimmingly, as I entered my foreign resident’s ID number. I went through a bit of security, and up came a form already partly, and correctly, completed. I filled in the rest and pressed ‘Submit’, thinking “wow, that was easy”. 

I was celebrating too soon.

Another screen appeared asking me to include images of various documents. A utility bill. No problem, I get those online anyway. Scans of my resident’s card. No problem, I’d already saved them on my laptop. The document certifying that I’m registered as a resident of my local council area.

Whoops. Mine was way out of date.

Fortunately, there’s another online service for this document, run by the council in Paterna, the nearby town into which our neighbourhood falls. So I started a second, different online process.

Again, it started smoothly. ID, security, and up came a near completed form. I was a little thrown by a panel labelled ‘Description’. What did they want? Was I supposed to say “it’s paper, A4 in size, black print on white, with the Council’s logo”? I didn’t think so, since I suppose they already knew what their certificates looked like.

So should it be “short, grey, overweight but nonetheless winsome”? I wasn’t convinced of that either, if only because not everyone considers me winsome, however hard I try. 

It was a mandatory field so I had to find something to write. In the end, I just put in a brief explanation of why I needed the form and hoped that would work. Then I pressed ‘Submit’.

We still weren’t quite there. “Click here to sign your document”. I did. An hour glass turned, the system considered things with care, and finally reached a decision.

“The database is unable to verify your signature. We regret the inconvenience.”

I tried several times, always with the same outcome. Was it my signature that didn’t work? Was it the database that was failing? Who knew?

In the end I decided to go and see the council myself. No problem. There’s an online system for appointments too. So I asked for one.

“There are no appointments available for this service,” I was told.

I gave up. I’ll go and see them without an appointment in the morning, I decided. If only to make an appointment.

That’s where the mistiming started. 

It had been hot for weeks. Blue skies with bright sun, which were excellent. Broiling heat, not so much. It was sunny when I started cycling towards the Council offices.

Then the weather decided to change. The heavens opened. The rain flooded down.

Except in the autumn, when they can go on for hours or days, our rainstorms tend to last no more than fifteen minutes. I was fifteen minutes from home. If I headed back, I’d more than likely get there just as the rain stopped.

I decided that I’d find a café where I could wait for a while. That wasn’t as easy as it sounds. I was in the middle of an industrial estate. But the Spanish don’t like to be too far from a café, even when there are factories and warehouses around for miles. A few minutes more of water cycling and I found a place where I could get a coffee and take a little shelter.

Not shelter from getting wet, of course. That ship had sailed. I was dripping. But at least I could steam a little and start the process of drying.

A few minutes later the rain stopped, and I rode on towards the council offices. I was a little worried about walking into an office in my state of soaked dishevelment. But I needn’t have worried.

The council offices were shut. Not something they’d marked on the website. Not something, what’s more, they’d bothered to put on a notice on the office door. Apparently, I should simply have known that it was a public holiday in Paterna. 

So what was it? The feast day of some obscure saint, Ildefonso perhaps or Hortensia, that no one else has ever heard of but who matters hugely to Paterna? Or something even more wonderful and weird?

Turns out that it was the wonderful and weird.

The great festival in Valencia is called the Fallas. One of the things that marks this festival is people wandering the streets and flinging firecrackers around, with little concern for who else may be nearby. Some of the crackers are like what most of us are used to. Others are, shall we say, of rather higher calibre. The heavy artillery version of ordinary, boring firecrackers.

This creates an atmosphere remarkably evocative of such places as Grozny, in Chechnya, when Chechen rebels were taking sniper shots at Russian tanks, which were firing back with their canon. Not really my kind of party but, hey, who am I to judge the fun of others?

Paterna goes a step further. There people like to throw the firecrackers at each other. In fact, in their version of this feast, the Cordá, the main players wear protective clothing, making them look like bomb disposal experts. Then they throw apparently lethal explosives at each other, with great mirth and, apparently, to general enjoyment. I’ve never been, but I’m told it’s exciting.

Personally, I feel the atmosphere must be rather like a First World War trench under artillery bombardment. That was, I’m sure, exciting. Perhaps, though, not in the way most of us would actively seek.

All the fun of a war zone at the Paterna Cordá
And fewer of the participants die

Fortunately, or perhaps I should say mercifully, the Cordá lasts only a day. But Paterna has to take the following day off. Recovering from the hangovers I suppose, or getting discharged from Emergency. Or they may simply need the time to collect the bodies from the streets.

A Paterna householder’s protection from the Cordá
Wire mesh against the explosives

Sadly, I’d tried to get into a council office the day after the Cordá. They were probably closed while triaging the injuries. I went disconsolately, and squelchily, home. And pondered the consequences of mistiming one’s actions.

There I discovered that it’s no good asking for an appointment in just any one of the three Paterna council offices that offer documentation services. They each offer different services. There’s no way of knowing which office does which services – or at least I’ve found no way – but having tried each of the other two at random, I was eventually able to make an appointment in the one that did the certificate I needed.

A couple of days later, I turned up for may appointment. My tribulations weren’t quite over. It turned out that the office had moved. The kind lady at the old office told me “go straight down the road and then keep going downhill, taking the second on the left”. I went straight down the road and then found myself facing a choice of three streets, all of which ran downhill. I turned up late of the office in an obscure side street no one I asked had ever heard of, but they weren’t bothered about the delay and saw me anyway. The document took about a minute to produce.

When I got home, I went back to the original task I’d set out to do – you may vaguely remember that it was an administrative procedure concerning the car – and tried again, with my nice new certificate scanned and ready to go.

I was dreading being told that my signature had been refused. But no! Everything went through on the nod. The process took about ten minutes.

So between the process for the car and the process of obtaining the certificate, the whole thing had taken say 20 minutes of actual, productive time. In elapsed time, however, it had taken five days. And within that time, including two trips to Paterna and back, I’d spent five or six hours on it.

Computerisation can save a lot of time. When it works. And when it doesn’t, you’ve got to get the timing right.