Comment by jillesvangurp

The word kafka-esque was inspired by German bureaucracy. Making an appointment to make an appointment sounds exactly like that.

I once queued in at the local council in Berlin for a guy that handed out numbers for the machine in the waiting room. When your name comes up, you go to the assigned room for whatever you needed (something related to my registration if I remember correctly). All the guy did was push a button and hand out a number. So you queue to start queuing. Very nice guy and friendly. But also one of the most pointless jobs I've ever seen.

Somebody later explained to me that they invented jobs like this to keep otherwise completely redundant former DDR civil servants in some kind of job. They had way too many of those and they were kind of very unemployable in a city with very high unemployment (at the time). It's literal busy work that they invented to avoid having to fire the person. Besides, being a civil servant is an iron clad job for life in Germany. So firing wasn't an option to begin with.

A German DOGE wouldn't be a bad thing at this point. Maybe do it without all the hyperbole and libertarianism. But the CDU that just won the election did actuall campaign on the notion of Germany being crippled by its own bureaucracy. Which of course the CDU helped create for the many decades they've been in power (almost on stop since WW II). The last four years were one of only two (I think) exceptions to that.