Third week: bureaucracy

Third week: bureaucracy

In the third week of my sabbatical I was busy with German bureaucracy.

My health insurance company needed to figure out how much I will have to pay this year. Therefore they first wanted the official confirmation that I am unemployed. I don’t have this. I didn’t register at the job center because I do not want to get any financial support. Then they asked for my annual tax declaration from 2016 to see how much money I made as a freelance consultant last year. This didn’t make sense, because last year I was still an employee. The insurance systems in Germany are not prepared for workers taking one year off. But luckily in my insurance company I can still communicate with human beings and not machines, so at the end this nice lady and me found a compromise how to handle it that we can both live with. After that I had to deal with some more burocracy but more about that in other blogposts.