So unbelievable it must be true
I actually don’t think that I have any email that is interesting for well anyone. Not the governments nor private industry but every now and then you wonder if anyone is looking through your digital trashcan. Well, I was sending an email and I was a bit distracted and had forgotten to actually attach my file.
Well, google mail is ever so helpful as it pointed out that I had failed to add my attachment. This was quite convenient but also a bit creepy.
Like most adults I get a lot of mail, junk mail and other advertisements most of which doesn’t even need to be examined. My credit card company sent me a letter that appeared to be my statement but it wasn’t. It was a nice letter explaining that in the future the credit card company would be charging church tax on any interest received.
Huh? Well, in Germany the government collects church tax on income earned for those individuals who are part of organized religion with common examples being the Catholic or Protestant church. This money then is funneled back to the churches. People normally associate the church tax with their paycheck or perhaps banking interest.
I found it to be an amazing move, after all how many people make interest on their credit card. Most credit card users end up paying 19% or more, now if for some reason they actually make interest on their credit card they will end up paying a good chunk of that back to the church. It is difficult to say if this is an example of bureaucracy at its worst or an example of greed run amok to try and get the last penny.
I was reading through a forum when all of a sudden I saw some middle eastern looking text, it seemed to be a bit non-sequitur so I thought I would look it up.
I wouldn’t have thought much about the process of translating this if the message had been using a Latin character set, but it wasn’t. The funny thing was that Google translate offered a translation but they also offered to correct my Arabic. To me the corrected Arabic looked totally different from the original.
I cannot believe that the spam emails would not have the best possible grammar.
It was a slow day at work and somehow the topic of discussion turned to about silly questions on official forms. My colleague Zachary told me the silliest question he ever encountered was on the US visa form. I doubted him but I felt I should take a check.
The US visa form is long and actually pretty boring form, the beginning is full of your basic personal information – who are you, where can we find you and your family and where will you be staying.
It isn’t that the questions are totally without merit, but it seems that the US government is looking to filter out people who have impure motives well that and really stupid criminals.
7 Deadly sins
You should not show an excess amount of pride or else, is what I should have been thinking. But instead I decided that my son is, just like me, an American and so we will use our American passports to leave Germany to visit grandma and grandpa for Christmas.
The three of us crossed passport control, boarded our airplane and had a great time with grandma and grandpa. On our return the border guard stamped Timothy’s passport on our entry and we went home none the wiser.
It was the next year, we were going to visit again for Christmas. There is not enough pre-travel and pre-christmas stress as going through an airport at this time of year. It was as we were trying to get out of the country that everything all came together. There is really no reason why either myself or my wife should experience any problems leaving. My wife is German so she had no problems, and I had the necessary German paperwork covering about 6 pages of my passport so that also was not a problem. The real culprit was little Timothy.
The boarder guard had eagle eyes and saw that the little tyke had no living permit in his passport, and so although he did not think we stole him, he could see that he came to Germany about a year ago and thus he had overstayed his permitted three months. I am not quite sure what the penalty is for overstaying your leave but the guard didn’t want to let the little scofflaw escape so easily.
The mother was obviously German, due to both her passport and by this time also her attitude. Thus the child of a German actually is a German and doesn’t really need any special living papers. The crazy thing he has a passport we just didn’t bring it as his father had almost unilaterally decided that the boy is an American and thus will be traveling on his US passport leaving the German passport at home.
It was a recipe for disaster, and it would have turned out very badly if the computer system had not proven that indeed my wife did have a child and his name matched that of my son. The guard did let us pass.
We enjoyed our Christmas but of course we had similar problems on our way back into the country as well. My wife was able to explain the entire story again and the border guard didn’t really like the situation but he did at least let us back in but he made us promise to visit the proper authorities to get this cleared up.
Lesson learned: Travel with both sets of papers
It was the next year when we did have all of our papers that we saw someone else who appeared to be in the exact same situation. However, this foreign bride was traveling alone with the child and the border guard was not as forgiving.
Lesson learned: Always bring a native from that country to help sort out problems
But I am not drunk …. When you hear this line it is typically from someone who has indeed had too much to drink. But perhaps I am getting ahead of my myself.
Our doctor received a 15 year old female who was found in a ditch. This may or may not sound so surprising but you must remember that in Germany roads don’t normally have ditches. Well, that is a bit too bold of a statement. Ditches do occur but you might find them next to an autobahn or perhaps far out in the country.
I work in a small Frankfurt hospital. The reason that our patient was delivered my hospital was because the hospital closest to where the patient was discovered did not accept children.
I could see that the patient did have something in her system so asked how much she had to drink. She was told that she didn’t have anything to drink, and truth be told there was no smell of alcohol on her breath. It is a hard world full of bad people, did someone slip her something or take advantage of her? Well, you might as well tell me about you evening as the blood test will tell all.
Obviously the young girl was reasonably full of herself when she responded.
Ver fick dich du alte kuh
(approx Fuck off old bitch)
Well, she was a bit more talkative after that. She claims that she goes out every night and parties and that of course her parents know all about it.
Wow, but how did she end up in the ditch, and how did she end up here? Well, the patient was out with her girlfriend and they were having such a good time that they had to walk their bikes back home. What an evening it was. Her blood alcohol level was 1.6 pro mil, she literally was too drunk and too tired to keep going. She simply laid down in the ditch.
Her friend kept going, walking both bikes home. Luck was with them as friends of her parents saw her walking home and offered her a lift. It was a cold night and her parents were out of town, which truth be told might have helped her to get out to party. When she was dropped off at home, she did mention to the adults that her friend was laying in the ditch out there.
So the adults went out and found the girl and called the ambulance. When the ambulance got there she was cold and wet, she had lost a couple of degrees Celsius and so they had her remove her wet things and wrap up on a thermoblanket.
The temperature was near freezing. Considering the long term memory of a drunk there must have been guardian angel on overtime. Our patient’s drinking partner’s folks were not home. At this temperature you could easily die from hypothermia in two to three hours, she never would have lasted until morning.
Well, about 30 minutes later the girls parents show up and claim that such an outburst does sound out of character but did not deny that it occurred.
People are the same everywhere, you might find a genius in a small town (Albert Einstein, Ulm Germany), or you might find one or more idiots in a big city such as my neighbor. It turns out that in Slovakia there is a tiny village where the cumulative village IQ is being dragged down because some of the inhabitants cannot figure out how to move away.
The story is actually quite common, boy meets girl, boy loves girl, and finally boy leaves girl. Unfortunately the fairly tale changes tone when the boy receives a visit as part of an investigation to determine the paternity of the child.
It seems that the young couple must have been quite friendly as reason for this visit was due to the celebration of an August birth. When confronted by what seemed to be incontrovertible evidence the boy suggested that it really could not be his baby. After all, he had not been with the girl in question since new years eve, and that was really some time back.
Well, It did take come explaining but after learning not only how babies are made but how long of a process it is before the actual birth. Once all of this was clear he did admit that perhaps he could indeed be the father.
Apparently, the entire process is not started with a letter written to a stork after all.
The patient was in for a routine check. It was just for a routine liver biopsy, nothing serious. He checked into the hospital but didn’t get the best roommate. The roommate was an alcoholic with a history of psychiatric problems. When nobody was around it seems that our alcoholic patient decided to take the banker’s clothes and go for a walk. The banker had very good taste in clothing as was obvious from his “handsome” silver metallic suit.
This was only realized near the end of the shift. Pretty much as you might expect when somebody takes someone else’s property you have to get the police involved. Our Dr. heroine bore witness to the entire situation. It began with with people being hurriedly interviewed and all of the facts being written down in a notebook.
It is less clear what happened to the keys, wallet and other personal effects but in general things turned as it could have been expected. The alcoholic with a new suit and a pocket full of money felt like going out and celebrating. He was found a few hours later sleeping it off on a park bench. Standard procedure for the German police when they find a passed out person is to bring him to a hospital for medical attention.
Imagine the surprise, not even 12 hours later, when our heroine walked into a room to check on a new patient. The previous alcoholic was now laying in a new room in the same hospital being checkout by the same medical staff. There was one additional fact that that was also quite obvious. The drunk was a very well dressed unconscious patient – well that and apparently a very stinky one. It was actually difficult to be in the same room due to the smell of urine, fecal material as well as other odd fragrances.
There must have been a conversation about how the suit was once again found but that was not reported. All we do know is that the banker let his former roommate keep the suit.
Different countries do things differently. In Germany in the past, each doctor’s practice was responsible for any little emergencies that their patients had during the night. Being on call all the time, as you might imagine, is not so desirable so the doctor’s worked out a solution. A group of “emergency” doctors were paid by the doctors for taking care of anything that occurred during the night.
This responsibility is still in force today. It was during one of these night shifts that the doctor was faced with an unusual situation. The patient was not 100% fluent in German, but was able to describe the symptoms – cramps and back pains. The young lady who was in her late 20’s was also a new mother.
Some of the questions asked of the patient were related to family history but considering the age and the symptoms a specific line of questioning emerged. One of the questions that came up was about the use of contraception. However, the answers kept coming back about how the patient was breast feeding. The answer itself was a bit puzzling but there was a medical possibility that indeed breast feeding might prevent the ovulation. This is not quite the same as contraception.
Well, it turns out that that the patient didn’t misunderstand the question but believed that breast feeding was just as good as other methods of baby prevention.
She was mistaken and received a congratulatory comment as the doctor left the apartment.
As a medical professional there are probably quite a few things to fear. Fear of unjust malpractice suit, fear of a just malpractice suit, the possibility that you may be accidentally stuck by an infected needle are just a few of the big and yet routine concerns that are faced every day.
One issue that I had never given thought to was that your patient would overpower and choke you to death. I never knew that my fiancee was in this very situation with her patient. The patient had a couple pieces of bad luck, the first was that he had a multi-resistant bacterial infection and the second was he had multi-farction dementia. Because of infection this patient was in a special separated room with a closed door. The dementia part is reasonably clear, the multi-farction part simply means that it is brought on by a series of small strokes. This meant that over time this otherwise healthy 55 year old wouldn’t remember a thing but would remain fit as an ox.
My fiancee was trying to take blood when he woke up. It really wasn’t his fault that he was confused and in a strange surroundings, but his reaction was to reach out and start choking the medical student who was taking blood. Doctors do have a great knowledge of anatomy, pressure points and all that, yet that would not have saved her from a larger stronger opponent. The thing that did save her was that other medical personnel happened to come into the room at that instant.
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