24/07/2014

“You have to type ‘Straße” instead of ‘Str.’.”

“Ok.”

“And if they don’t give their birth date, you just type in 01/01/1900.”

“Got it.”

“Christ, there are so many little details to bear in mind, aren’t there?”

“Yes, so many – how will he ever get the hang of it?”

There were no further little details. And I put it down to my widely celebrated talent for online form completion that getting the hang of it lasted all of about five minutes.

This week, I have entered the world of forms. That is, an intensely bureaucratic, non-platonic world of forms. There are so many forms. There are forms as far as the eye can see. Almost everything you can see is a form, and some of the things you can’t see are also forms. The unseen forms are usually only out of sight because they’re behind other forms.

There are forms for booking train tickets, forms for acquiring cheaper lunch in the canteen, forms for declaring cash levels in the store’s counters, and many, many more. For a diehard bureaucrat, I imagine there’d be nothing like a day of work behind the Customer Service desk to get the blood pumping. But it’s not all forms. Often the forms are contained within folders. In fact, it’s work environments like this which have given rise to the popular German phrase: “Where there are forms, there are also folders*.”

The form I’ve come to specialise in is a very particular and exotic form, used to gather details of applications for Alsterhaus loyalty cards. Learning to enter the contents of these forms onto the Alsterhaus’ online system gave rise to the conversation related above, and it is now my most useful skill, as I spend about three or four hours per day in the pursuit.

The form in question has slowly become the object of my admiration. It is beautifully crafted, quietly serving its purpose without trying to be anything more than it needs to be. It is sly, even cheeky at times, with the section titled “opt in to promotional material” featuring a box which must be ticked to opt out. The form punishes the hasty while rewarding the meticulous, and I like that about it. It’s also in a blue colour scheme, which is always a plus.

This one is pretty close to being platonic.

There are two facets of form processing which have managed to keep my mind distracted from the monotony of the task (I do not fall into the afore mentioned diehard bureaucrat category). One is my development of a rather brilliant game. The other is poor handwriting. Prepare yourself for rollercoaster articles on each when I find the time to write them.

*This phrase is a little like the English “where there’s smoke there’s fire”, with the main difference being that it doesn’t actually exist and I made it up.