The longer I think about it, the more convinced I become that Easter originated as an invention by historical admin types to “improve” our life quality.

Think about it …

We’re talking about one of the most important religious celebrations / holidays of the year (except perhaps in North America where John Oliver summed Easter up best by referring to it as “shitty Christmas”) and we can’t even figure out when it is. Depending on, of all things, the moon, Easter can fall anywhere between March 22nd and April 25th in any given year.

(This relatively large timespan makes Jesus Christ fairly unusual among famous historical figures. For many such figures, we know the day on which they died (because they had become famous by then), but often don’t know when they were born (because they weren’t yet). Take Shakespeare for example. Assuming that he was not Francis Bacon (or anyone else other than Shakespeare), we know that he died on April 23rd, 1616. But, the most we know about the other side of the life of arguably the greatest writer in the English language is that he was baptized on April 26th, 1564. Another good example is William of Ockham, who died on April 9th, 1347. The most parsimonious thing that we can say about his birth, however, is that he was probably born in 1287 and probably in the British village of Ockham. (My all-time personal favourite though is Plato. According to Wikipedia, he was born sometime between 428 and 423 BC (either that or it was one hell of a labour for his poor mother), but died more politely, if still unusually slowly, from 348 to 347 BC. (Seneca helpfully claims that Plato died on his birthday, but unhelpfully doesn’t happen to mention what day that might have been.))

But with Jesus, it’s the exact opposite. We know precisely on which day and at what time he was born, but he dies on a different day from one year to the next. Huh?)

Anyway. Now where was I?

For me personally, whether holiday or celebration, I simply find Easter to be a logistical nightmare because it hops around more than the bunny it’s come to be associated with. Some years, I can ignore Easter entirely and just enjoy the four-day long weekend it brings. (Sort of. Throughout Germany, there is a ban on dancing on Good Friday. Like Easter itself, there is no standard here and the ban can be as short as part of Good Friday only (Berlin, Bremen, and Hamburg) or extend all the way from 4 AM on Maundy Thursday (the day before Good Friday) to 4 PM on Easter Sunday (Rhineland-Palatinate). I can sort of understand this. The crucifixion of the son of God is not really an occasion for partying, now is it? What I can’t understand is why it’s largely restricted to dancing (meaning that going to a bar and getting drunk is probably ok or at least legal), why only Hamburg also extends the ban to moving house, and why the government has to legislate what in the end amounts to religious decorum. If you feel that dancing on Good Friday is inappropriate, then simply don’t dance. You really don’t need the government to back you up on this.) But, when Easter falls mid (to late) like it does this year, it can hop its the way into the start of teaching for the German summer semester, which is fixed for the middle of April.

For instance, the first day of classes this year falls on Easter Monday, except that that’s a holiday in Germany, so it doesn’t and gets pushed back onto the Tuesday. The week before that, when we usually hold all the organizational meetings for the different classes, are the provincial Easter holidays so those meetings kind of fall flat too and have to be done during the course instead.

Ok. Annoying but not really a nightmare. The latter only starts because of some knock-on effects that chew away even more teaching time. Probably unbeknownst to most North Americans, there are more than a few additional, associated holidays starting 40 days after Easter: Ascension Day, Whit Monday, and Corpus Christi. As such, exactly when they occur depends on when Easter falls in that year; however, they all fall squarely in the summer semester regardless of what Easter decides to do.

The beauty of Ascension Day (or Jesus Skydrive if you translate the German Christi Himmelfahrt literally) and Corpus Christi is that they always fall on Thursdays, meaning that they tend to take out the following Fridays too because one can never have enough Easter-related, four-day long weekends. On top of this, Ascension Day in Germany doubles up as Father’s Day, with many people, fathers or otherwise, completely forgetting the religious significance of the day and instead using the opportunity to get ripe royally ripped and making the subsequent long weekend more or less predestined, if not a necessity. Although it has nothing to do with Easter, add in the first of May (May Day; same principle as Father’s Day, just boozier) and the chaos is more or less complete.

Although I’ve learned to avoid holding classes on Thursdays or Fridays in the summer semester, my Monday course takes a very variable beating from year to year. Best-case scenario is Whit Monday unavoidably chewing away one class. This year, however, Easter Monday and May Day come on top of that. Missing just three classes might not sound like a lot, but that’s a little more than one-fifth of the 14 that there are in total. That’s quite a chunk of material to not be covering and makes it difficult to ensure that the course is consistent from year to year.

As it turns out, most of this is completely unnecessary because Jesus does indeed conform to most famous historical figures insofar as the date of his death has been pretty well nailed down to either April 7th, 30 AD or April 3rd, 33 AD (unsurprisingly, both Fridays) and probably at about 3 PM. Instead, much less is agreed upon about the time of his birth. The consensus of most scholars is that he was born sometime between 6 BC and 4 BC, but the exact date, the month, and even the season remain contested.

So, despite the latter uncertainty, let’s agree to keep Christmas as it is and split the difference and fix Easter as April 5th of each year. Or even the Friday closest to the 5th. It’s still late enough to wreak havoc with my teaching, but at least it’s consistent havoc and I see that as a step up.

At the end of last year, my lab manager went into extended, part-time maternity leave for all of 2023 so that I needed to find a temporary replacement for her for the afternoons. The historical, first step in such cases was always to ask around the department to see if there was someone else who was qualified and on a part-time contract and wanted to stock up for a short time.

And you know what? It all worked out pretty damn good in most cases. The search was simplified and both sides knew pretty much what they were getting (or getting themselves into), part of which was a person who was already in the building and knew all the twisted ropes that this particular department and university had on offer. And, don’t forget, we’re talking about a part-time, temporary position here and so weren’t really doing a great injustice to anyone on the outside.

However, after having found just such a person in our department, I was told that the position, despite being part-time and temporary, still had to be advertised officially to maintain accountability. The University of Not-Bielefeld is, after all, a public institution that is funded by public money (but is, strangely enough, still private property) and the taxpayer has the right to know that their money is being used responsibly. Exactly like when public money is used to bail out private businesses because their unaccountable actions mean that they aren’t making enough profit anymore.

Anyway …

In Act I, I had to form an official hiring committee so I quickly tapped three people from my working group, which is about the minimum number I could get away with. Additionally included as observers on this committee, however, were one member each from the departmental office, the faculty’s equal-opportunities office, the university’s employee council, and, potentially, the university’s equal-opportunities office.

Now this is not to imply that the equal-opportunities offices of the faculty and the university don’t communicate with or trust one another. They just target different minorities is all: women at the faculty level and persons with disabilities at the university one. (I have no idea what politically-correct terminology has against adjectives. Seriously! Beside the extra, convoluting syllables, what is the honest-to-goodness difference between “disabled person” and “person with disabilities”? If anything, the latter implies that the person has more than one disability. And why are adjectives only outlawed for minorities? For instance, no one would ever refer to me, a white male, as a person with underpigmentation and heterozygous sex chromosomes. Seems to me that adjectives should sue for discrimination here …)

At least the university office admits their narrower scope because German name for the officer in charge (SchwerbehindertenbeauftragterIn) clearly indicates the focus on people with disabilities. This isn’t the case for the faculty’s Gleichstellung office, the name of which literally translates out to “equal opportunity” (which is also the English translation that the university uses), but the practical remit of which doesn’t extend beyond women.

You want to hire disproportionately more women? That’s cool. Women have been on the short end of the academic stick (and many others) for far too long. Just call it what it is. (And please don’t call it “positive discrimination”, which is simply moronic because it’s needlessly oxymoronic. Discrimination is negative. Period. So don’t try to be clever and try to make it something positive especially when other, better, and more direct phrases for it like “equal opportunity” or “affirmative action” already exist. Imagine the outcry if you tried the same trick with the word “racism” (which is actually just a subset of discrimination, BTW) …) For instance, our departmental office, which has been 100% female for about a decade now, once had to fight with the faculty “Gleichstellung” office to have a phrase included for an open, secretarial position they had that men, the minority gender in this case, were specifically encouraged to apply. And the “Gleichstellung” officer? Has to be female according to the University’s (almost definitely illegal) regulations and is elected at a meeting to which only women can attend. Gleichstellung has never looked so ungleich before …

And then comes Act II …

The position was then advertised through the personnel department on the university’s web pages and, after all was said and done, there was one whole applicant: the same woman I had head-hunted a few weeks earlier and had informed about the advertisement. Everyone else seems to have somehow overlooked the ad despite it running for an entire two weeks (the official minimum) from December 14th to 28th. Curious …

And then came the motions in Act III …

First a meeting to decide on a shortlist (and if one isn’t a short list then I don’t know what is), then another meeting where the candidate was interviewed by the committee, and finally a meeting where the committee made a recommendation of who to hire. And then the obligatory paperwork: minutes of each of the “meetings”, a form indicating the “Gleichstellung” measures, and finally a form to hire the preferred candidate. Annoyingly, most of these forms asked for the exact same information such that they could have been combined into one with copies sent around as needed. More curiously, although all the forms allowed the applicants for the position to be non-binary, the same was not true for members of the hiring committee who had to be either male or female. And this on the “Gleichstellung” form of all things! So non-binary people apparently either have to choose their gender upon being hired by the University of Not-Bielefeld or don’t get to sit on any hiring committees.

In the end, the one lingering question to this three-act charade is where the much ballyhooed accountability was. There was a lot of talk—and a lot more bureaucracy—but little to no real action.

Let’s be honest: the result with all the “accountability” was exactly the same as the one I would have gotten otherwise. Both the hiring committee and the advertisement (especially the timing of it) were just this side of illegitimate. And all the other control mechanisms were largely no-shows as well. I’ll give the university equal-opportunity office a pass here because there were no candidates with disabilities so their input wasn’t needed. The same goes for the departmental office, which had actually done their work already in letting me know beforehand what the legal requirements for the process were. But, the faculty “Gleichstellung” office politely jumped ship before anything got rolling and I only ever heard back from the employee council twice, both times saying on short notice that they wouldn’t be able to attend the meetings where the important decisions (making the shortlist and who to hire) were being made. For the employee council they at least admitted that it was because of a shortage of Homo-sapiens power and the same was probably true for the faculty “Gleichstellung” office as well.

But if you’re going to make other people jump through hoops for you, then at least have the decency to be there in person to hold the damn hoops and not just reserve the right to veto any decision afterwards that you could’ve actively been a part of beforehand.

If you can’t, then maybe those hoops weren’t all that important in the first place now were they?

Last year was a year to remember. The war in the Ukraine. The death of Queen Elizabeth II. Deadly human-rights protests in Iran. Corona finally beginning to loosen its grasp. And earth-shaking tax reform in Germany.

Well, maybe not earth-shaking, but at least earthy insofar as it had to do with property …

The backstory is that in 2018, the Federal Constitutional Court in Germany declared that the law governing property tax was invalid and had to be updated. The problem was that the law was based on data and calculations from either 1964 (former West Germany) or 1935 (former East Germany, presumably because the Wall meant that nothing in East Germany could be updated until 1989) and so was hideously out of date. As such, identical, neighbouring buildings could have wildly different property values because of the vagaries of the real-estate market and the even bigger vagaries of the municipal assessment offices. This effectively amounted to discrimination, something that is thankfully illegal according to the German constitution.

(Now, if you think that’s all kind of silly, then let’s talk about parking spots. This being Germany, the allowed sizes of them have been written into law since at least 1939, the relevant one being some variation on the word Garagenverordnungen (“garage ordinance”) and “helpfully”, if variably, shortened to any of GarVO, GaVO, or GaStellV. Now, when my apartment building was built in 1998, the ordinance in power at the time specified a minimum width of 2.3 m for a parking spot. The problem is that my 2013 Nissan Note is about 1.7 m wide without the mirrors, leaving about 30 cm on each side when it’s parked. For reference, I’m slightly less than 40 cm wide and about 30 cm “deep”, making it a real squeeze to even get to the car door I can’t open. And, according to the British site buyacar, my Note is only average in width. (As am I too, according to anthropometrics.) Worse yet, a quarter of a century later, those exact same specifications are still being used in the Garagenverordnung currently in force in Not-Bielefeld.)

Anyway, 2022 was the chosen year to end homeowner discrimination in Germany. The solution was simple: update the database. And the method was even more elegant: get all the property owners to do it!

Fortunately, there were any number of people willing to help out with this daunting task. For instance, in my case, it included my tax accountant, the property-management company overseeing my building, and even the ex-tax accountant of my ex-wife. Why all the unsolicited generosity? Ah, there was money to be made here you see, namely about 200 EUR for the service.

Probably unbeknownst to most, however, is that it wasn’t so much of a service as a ripoff, with even the German Ministry of Finance saying that the whole process was relatively easy to accomplish. All the data that were needed for this process were

• the contact data of the owner(s),
• the surface area of the entire property,
• the percent of the property owned,
• the year of construction of your building on the property,
• the surface area of your house / apartment,
• the number of garage parking places (presumably according to the current GarVO, GaVO, or GaStellV and not reality),
• the entry number of the property in the land registry,
• the tax or reference number of the property, and
• the ground value of the property.

Only the last three of these were perhaps slightly more difficult to get, with most of the rest being spelled out in the purchase contract and/or basic data about the building that you should have gotten when buying it. (“Most” meaning that you should really know your own contact details, even if it too was in the same documents.) And, to get as far as getting a purchase contract, you had to update the entry for the property in the land registry first. And, once you know that entry number (which you need to update the entry), there were websites set up by the government to give you the last two values.

So definitely not no work, but definitely not 200 EUR worth either because it probably involved only about 15-20 minutes for those who knew how it all worked and got the necessary data from you in the first place. (Or about three plus hours for me who didn’t, most of which involved trying to understand and navigate the government’s tax website with its arcane language and finicky forms to input all the data.) In any case, I managed it and forgot completely about it until the official confirmation / new assessment arrived in the mail the other day …

… in Croatia.

Ah yes. It seems that I made a(t least one) slight mistake in filling out the forms and flipped the addresses of my wife and I. Thus the assessment was addressed and mailed to her with a note that it should be brought to my attention. (So, yes, I did know my contact details, I just didn’t know how to enter them properly. Interestingly, had I gotten her address wrong, the undeliverable letter would have ended up in Salzburg, Austria according to the postmark and no one would know anything about it ever again.)

Should be an easy fix, right?

Roadblock #1: getting in contact with the tax office.

First stop was to phone up the tax office, which was also the first mistake. The assessment only listed a phone number that led to an answering machine with only two messages, neither of which were particularly helpful or accurate: 1) all the lines are busy and 2) you’re calling outside of normal working hours. My mistake was to call on a Friday, a day that is holier to admin than Good Friday is to Christians. Forget about the Germany-wide ban on dancing on Good Friday, we’re talking about an admin-wide ban on working on Any Friday. So there’s a good chance that the lines were not so much busy as the office was just empty. All morning long. And contrary to the second recorded message, my last try on that Friday was indeed well within the times printed on the assessment. But, I guess that office hours can unexpectedly change a lot in the entire week since the assessment was printed and mailed.

Roadblock #2: the tax office.

Thankfully, calling again after what for us mortals counts a normal weekend resulted in reaching an actual admin type, but, unfortunately, with an unthankful answer: no, they couldn’t change anything. Instead I’d have to formally object to the assessment, either by mail or through the website. That’s right. Object to the assessment essentially because of a change of address. Even though the change was my fault, it’s really no different than moving or selling the property (either of which would also be my fault) and hopefully don’t merit a formal objection as well. Or updating the database, which is what this whole exercise was about in the first place.

Roadblock #3: the website of the tax office.

Not having learned my lesson the first time around, I decided to use the website to register my objection. After all, if I could achieve the same thing with a simple letter, I could probably send that letter directly via the website, right?

Hahahahaha …

Turns out there exists a specific, dedicated four-part form for objections that is as obscure and finicky as any other on the website. Got my name and address in ok (this time, sigh …), but then it was off to the meat of the form, the objection itself. I had to choose which assessment I was objecting to (Bescheid über die Grundsteueräquivalenzbeträge; mercifully available from a dropdown list), the relevant year (another dropdown list), whether I was objecting to the entire assessment or only part of it (button), and then why I was objecting to it (free text). After the form resolutely objected to my input for 20 minutes, I discovered that the year was optional in this case and could be left blank, but whether I was objecting in whole or in part was not and had to be filled out. Just changing the address sounded like “in part” to me and so I went with that. The form was happy and submittable and so I too was weirdly happy if slightly vegetable.

In the end, it all wasn’t so much a case of a lot of time wasted, but a lot of time unnecessarily wasted because it was all so unnecessary and unnecessarily complicated. The closed-ranks nature of the entire process makes it seem like it was specifically designed to keep outsiders who don’t speak the lingo out so as to make money for the insiders who did. Even the non-eagle-eyed among us can easily see that precisely none of the updated data are going to be any different than the outdated data already on the books that they are replacing. The only exception to that might be the ground value of the property—probably the only relevant piece of data in the entire process—and that value came directly from the government anyway and so should have already been on the books.

So why on earth did so many people have to fry their sanity trying to navigate that awful website or surrender 200 EUR to have someone else do it for them?