friends! have you ever heard of an apostille? i hadn’t, either, until i attempted to provide my U.S. birth certificate as an official identifying document to a local department here in germany and the presiding officer gave me a look of genuine pity. my yellowing birth certificate - the one document, besides my social security card, which i had been taught to guard with my life - means nothing here, if not apostille’d.
on the way home i fumed, thinking that the requirement must’ve been borne of some tediously german-engineered bureaucracy. but in fact it turns out that 124 countries around the world signed the treaty recognizing the apostille as like a international notarization, and although Germany might be unique in the number of situations in which an apostille is required, it certainly is not alone in using it for the verification of foreign documents.
what i especially wasn’t prepared for, as i began looking up the process to request not only my birth certificate from Florida but also my old marriage and divorce certificates from Maryland - was for each individual state to have their own unique steps for requesting an apostille certificate, and that a private company (Vitalchek) appears to have built a sprawling monopoly in the market for americans desperately seeking to appease bureaucracies abroad, by making it possible to expedite and request documents online. Vitalchek’s services do seem decently well-run, but even its processes vary from document to document and state to state - I was able to request an apostille’d birth certificate from Florida, for instance, but in Maryland Vitalchek is only able to request my documents from the department of vital statistics; I still have to personally forward them on to the MD state department for certification after i receive them from the vital records office. i have not yet crossed the bridge of how i will retrieve the documents from my virtual mailbox, add a self-addressed stamped envelope to the package, and forward it onwards…
i will say this: there is nothing quite like being caught in an unending cycle of bureacracy-begetting-bureacracy to make a human being feel like a hamster running on a wheel!
I know exactly what you mean. we've had to do a lot of document collection (apostilled, of course) recently, and it's just-- ugh.
"there is nothing quite like being caught in an unending cycle of bureacracy-begetting-bureacracy to make a human being feel like a hamster running on a wheel!"
this also reminded me of this from Travels with Charlie, where he talks about how he feels in the aftermath of an unpleasant encounter with an official:
"But government can make you feel so small and mean that it takes some doing to build back a sense of self-importance. Charley and I stayed at the grandest auto court we could find that night, a place only the rich could afford, a pleasure dome of ivory and apes and peacocks and moreover with a restaurant, and room service. I ordered ice and soda and made a scotch and soda and then another. Then I had a waiter in and bespoke soup and a steak and a pound of raw hamburger for Charley, and I overtipped mercilessly. Before I went to sleep I went over all the things I wished I had said to that immigration man, and some of them were incredibly clever and cutting."
You should be some sort of a foreign bureaucratic docent!