WorkTales

Roommates can be a pain in the behind as they tend to be someone who may have raised up with different morals or cleanliness standards and most importantly a roomate is not (usually) your partner. It is easy to get upset with them but as they are not your significant other there is no love to taper your feelings towards their behavior. I am glad to say that not all of these stories are mine.

Don’t move in with your friends

Three girls who had been friends during high school found themselves at the same college and decided to share an apartment. They found a four bedroom apartment and found one other girl to share the lease. I am not sure where exactly things broke down but I think food was eaten, messes were made and common supplies were used by all and replaced by one.

Not sure how it got so much out of control. My buddy and I decided to visit my sister to find out things were a bit rocky, I had a lot of bad ideas pretty much designed to make things worse, while Greg had some pretty good ideas. I am pretty sure that things didn’t really improve as over time I heard little things here and there. However, the wildest thing I did hear was that everyone had their own toilet paper which was brought in when you used the toilet. After the lease was up, they all went separate ways.

Don’t move in with someone wilder than you are

Unless my sister changed, and changed a lot, she most likely wasn’t the party animal of the 3rd floor. Actually, all of her roommates seemed pretty sedate to me, but looks can be deceiving. It seems that one of the girls was quite the party animal and the rest of the building found out one Saturday about 3 in the morning.

Someone came and knocked on the door asking to come and pick up Julie. I guess it wasn’t because she was too wild but actually because she was busy throwing up and that was a bit of a downer. So my sister and one of her roommates went down to fetch Julie.

Don’t move in with a practical joker

James was actually a nice guy but he was a bit pretentious. Not only that be he was more often than not a pain in the behind. Well, it didn’t take too long for tensions to build in the apartment until eventually Marcus didn’t really like James any longer. James wasn’t going to get murdered in his sleep but Marcus was out to get him.

I don’t remember all of the ideas that he had for James but I remember the worst one along with the one that was actually done. The evil idea was that we should get some dehydrated milk powder and sprinkle some in his underwear. No idea where that one came from but it seemed too out of proportion response for the James eccentricities.

What actually happened was James had his own plates and cups that he used instead of the more mundane plates and cups Marcus and I used. I guess food and drink simply tasted much better on this old china. The plan was to take one of the cups and saucers and hide it in plain sight. One afternoon when the dishwasher was emptied the china was placed up on top of the cupboards behind one of the other less used dishes. Oddly enough, despite all of James efforts and questions it was not found until the end of the lease when he was packing to leave at the end of the lease.

Don’t move in with a girl who isn’t a girlfriend

Back in the day I pretty full of myself and didn’t seem to lack confidence and seemed to have an opinion on a lot of different topics. I am fairly confident that I was shooting my mouth off on some topic or other but later in the evening my roommate Laurie seemed upset.

She was either cleaning up for the evening or hiding in the bathroom and so I asked her if everything was ok, only to be assured that it was. Not satisfied I asked if there was anything I did or if she was angry at me.

No, everything is fine.

Not being a ladies man I wasn’t able to translate this sentence. It was a few days later that a friend of mine who was dating my roommate confided in me that no everything was not fine. I guess what I said had apparently belittled her field of study, she had confided to him that lied to me that day “He asked if I was upset but I wasn’t going to tell him!”.

I never did understand it, upset yes, but why not tell me. I guess I learned a bit more about women.

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.

• Do you have a communicable disease of public health significance such as tuberculosis?
• Do you have a mental or physical disorder that poses or is likely to pose a threat to the safety or welfare of your self or others?
• Are you or have you ever been a drug abuser or addict?
• Have you ever been arrested or convicted for any offense or crime, even though subject of a pardon, amnesty or other similar action?
• Have you ever violated, or engaged in a conspiracy to violate any law relating to controlled substances?
• Are you coming to the United States to engage in prostitution or unlawful commercialized vice or have you been engaged in prostitution or procuring prostitutes within the past 10 years?
• Have you ever been involved in or do you seek to engage in money laundering.
• Do you see to engage in espionage, sabotage, export control violations, or any other illegal activity while in the united states?
• Do you seek to engage in terrorist activities while in the United States or have you ever engaged in terrorist activities?
• Have you ever or do you intend to provide financial assistance or other support to terrorists or terrorist organizations?
• Are you a member or representative of a terrorist organization?
• Have you ever ordered, incited, committed, assisted or otherwise participated in genocide?
• Have you ever ordered, incited, committed, assisted or otherwise participated in torture?
• Have you ever ordered, incited, committed, assisted or otherwise participated in extra-judicial killings, political killings or other acts of violence?
• Have you while serving as a government official been responsible for or directly carried out at any time particularly severe violations of religious freedom?
• Have you ever sought to obtain or assist others to obtain a visa entry into the United States or any other United States immigration benefit by fraud or willful misrepresentation or unlawful means?

7 Deadly sins

• Wrath
• Greed
• Sloth
• Pride
• Lust
• Envy
• Gluttony

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