Never again will I play down the level of bureaucracy in Germany. It's. Insane.

Our nursery is essentially a cooperative nursery where parents cook, keep the rooms in shape and run the place. I've volunteered for the running the place bit and I'm run down. We're a club, which in Germany has a special legal meaning. This makes some sense because it allows clubs to act a bit like corporations -- the club carries the liability, not the members.

But in order to get club status you have to come up with club regulations, elect a club board and hold an official club meeting at least once a year. You also have to register your club and board with an administrative court. OK, I thought in the beginning, a bit of a run around but that legal status thing is kind of nice.

Except, in order to register any board changes with the court, you have to go through a notary, which in Germany are attorneys. They look at your passport, the minutes from the last meeting and charge you about 30 euros. Then you get to send it all in to the administrative court where they enter the changes. To keep my spirits up, I always envision court clerks as monks standing at long rows of lecterns entering information in centuries-old ledgers using feather quills.

You'd think that'd be the end.

You'd be wrong.

Rather than just manually entering your club's information in the ledger (lord knows German bureaucrats are still nervous about the "on" switches let alone the keyboards computers require), they actually get a cup of coffee, spread all the documents you've submitted on their desk and have a nice, deep look at everything. Everything, you assume, that's right because you paid an attorney to review it before you submitted it (isn't that what I paid her for?).

Then the court sends you a letter that you didn't follow the letter of your regulations and you'll have to do it again. In typical German bureaucrat style, they offer you a bit of a workaround with a wink of the eye but, I always think, if you're going to wink your eye, why not just let it slip past? This is not the proper etiquette, however. The proper etiquette is to thank them for moving their eyes at all.

And do it all again. I admit, the process takes twice as long for me because it's in a foreign language and -- for this particular work around -- requires me to collect letters from two other equally busy volunteers. But is this really the most efficient way of going about it? Doesn't every newspaper every day report on how the courts are backed up because they don't have enough personnel? Yet this one can care about paperwork submitted in bad German by a non-profit daycare that looks after 18 kids? Really?

I've learned to chuckle and just do what they want, though. You can't fight city hall.

But this makes it even more absurd that the EU appointed an aging German politician as their anti-bureaucracy specialist.

I hope they filled out the paperwork correctly.