| ▲ | danieldk a day ago | |
efficiency Having lived in Germany for five years, this is a total myth. The German administration is a tire fire, I mean a filing cabinet fire. First lesson is: learn to wait. Have to do things at the municipality or the Finanzamt? Prepare to reserve 1-2 hours of your day, because you will have to wait a lot. And then the administration is pretty chaotic because (for historical reasons) they do not want to link administrations. Then they do random things like accidentally changing your and your partner's tax brackets in the middle of the year. My wife (who is German) chased them until they would fix it and they had no clue how it happened. Other foreign colleagues often had similar issues. The same is true by the way with non-government stuff like medical care. Have an appointment with your GP or a medical specialist? Great, the appointment only means that you have to be there at a certain time. They will let you wait an hour or two without any remorse (what's the point of an appointment)? Nothing is efficient in Germany. Reliability is also a meme at this point. Even 10 years ago, about 1/4-1/2 of the ICE trains I took would have a serious delay (which usually ended being a 2-3 hour delay if you have to cross a border). We just came back from vacation in Germany (it continues to be a beautiful country with nice people) with our electric car. The charging infrastructure is deplorable. Not only they have only a small number of chargers available (even a lot of highway stops only have two chargers), so impossible to charge on a busy day. But not only that, a lot of chargers are broken and nobody really cares for fixing them. Sorry for the rant. tl;dr: Germany is not efficient and not reliable. | ||
| ▲ | marcus_holmes a day ago | parent | next [-] | |
This. German bureaucracy is a nightmare, especially if German is not your first language. German health system is a mess, but mainly because Germans are (probably rightly) suspicious of having electronic health records. | ||
| ▲ | gambiting a day ago | parent | prev [-] | |
My favourite anecdote regarding German EV chargers - I was trying to charge at a motorway stop couple years back, and the stupid charger needs an app, ok, got the app. And it's even in English, success! But.....when I try to add a payment card it says the billing address has to be in Germany. Ok, I'm determined so I ring their helpline.....only to be told it's open Monday to Saturday 9am till 4pm(it was Sunday). Honestly never seen this issue in any other EU country. | ||