How Files Are Stored

This needs very little explanation. Other than to say that as I have been working on getting my visa, I have visited approximately every building in Iasi that has anything to do with any kind of bureaucracy. Which seems to be all of them. I will discuss the Visa “process” (and by “process” I mean there is none) in a later entry, but suffice to say that every one of these government or office buildings I have been in has the same method of file ‘organization.’ Piles. Piles and piles and piles of papers. On the floor, on desks, on cupboards. Sometimes in boxes, mostly not. I would also like to point out that in the first picture you may notice that the shelves under which the papers are stacked are literally overflowing with floppy disks. Haven’t seen one of those since writing my eighth grade science report. Let alone 700. On both occasions I was fairly certain that I would be taken away to a dimly-lit room and interrogated at gunpoint about why I was taking pictures of their files. Perhaps I will yet be stolen out of my bed at night. In any event, this exemplifies Romanian bureaucracy to me. A whole lotta paperwork for a whole lotta nothing.