Red Tape Hot Box on ID cards
During the Christmas holidays, I was in Zakopane with a friend of mine. Unfortunately, the weather was determined to disappoint us, and just as we arrived all the snow melted. So we had to cancel our plans for snowboarding and skiing and instead come up with a new form of entertainment. Our new diversion was pubs. The day before New Year's Eve, we spent a very jolly evening in one of the local bars, and when we left we were feeling slightly jolly, too. On our way home, it seems we were a little too loud, prompting two policemen to stop us and ask for our dowód osobisty, or IDs. Neither of us had one, so instead we showed our driver's licences. However, this did not satisfy the officers, and before they let us go, they gave us a lecture on how decent citizens should always carry their ID cards.
This incident made me wonder why we are forced to have such documents. In the United States or Western Europe, a driver's licence will do. Unfortunately, our government has a different opinion on the matter. Instead of taking the sensible option of simply cancelling all ID cards, the interior ministry embarked on a new scheme two years ago to distribute new ones. The project, which is likely to be completed in 2007, will cost around €250 million (zł. 1 billion). So far, two million ID cards have been produced and distributed.
Yet another silly thing is that they all contain a grammatical error. There was a faulty translation into English in one of the references, where the names of both the holder's parents are written. Instead of "parents' given names," there appears "parent's given names." The interior ministry, however, said that this error was such a minor mistake that it did not invalidate the documents and therefore they did not have to be changed. They only forgot to add that such an error makes our bureaucrats who do not emloy competent translators look so foolish in the eyes of foreigners.
Red tape bugging you? Tell Mateusz about it at mdembinski@wbj.pl.
This incident made me wonder why we are forced to have such documents. In the United States or Western Europe, a driver's licence will do. Unfortunately, our government has a different opinion on the matter. Instead of taking the sensible option of simply cancelling all ID cards, the interior ministry embarked on a new scheme two years ago to distribute new ones. The project, which is likely to be completed in 2007, will cost around €250 million (zł. 1 billion). So far, two million ID cards have been produced and distributed.
Yet another silly thing is that they all contain a grammatical error. There was a faulty translation into English in one of the references, where the names of both the holder's parents are written. Instead of "parents' given names," there appears "parent's given names." The interior ministry, however, said that this error was such a minor mistake that it did not invalidate the documents and therefore they did not have to be changed. They only forgot to add that such an error makes our bureaucrats who do not emloy competent translators look so foolish in the eyes of foreigners.
Red tape bugging you? Tell Mateusz about it at mdembinski@wbj.pl.
