Berlin FAQ Blog

The trick with procrastination, I am finding, is not to feel guilty about doing it, because that stops me enjoying the time it frees up. In fact I think I might start a Verein called ProKrastination e.V. or similar to spread the word. When I get round to it, that is.

I have however finally managed to do my tax returns for 2005, a duty which I traditionally leave until the tax office sends me a series of stern warnings sometime in late November. Boy is that a task I dislike, especially because I need to fill in about 5 different forms to account for the various parts of the MountPenguin commercial empire, and I'm too cheap to hire someone to do it (and my filing system consists of a cardboard box which I shove receipts and official-looking bits of paper in). Actually it isn't all that difficult in theory, but the forms appear to have evolved organically over a course of many years and changes to tax law, so finding the right spots to fill in is a bit of a PITA. OK, it's easy enough to work out that I neither work in the timber industry nor am employed in Belgium for at least part of the year (yes - there's a special field just for Belgium), and have never knowingly participated in commercial animal breeding, but I have to sit down and sob silently into my copy of the Verpflegungsmehraufwendungentabelle when confronted with the question of whether I have ever paid Vorsteuerbeträge aus Leistungen im Sinne des §13b Abs. 1 UStG (§15 Abs. 1 Satz 1 Nr. 4 UStG). Apparently not, but I do wish they'd organise the forms so they read something like "for normal people just write your income here, and your expenditure here, and the total you think you owe us in here so we can have a good laugh; for people who voluntarily engage in three-way exchanges of goods and services throughout the EU and other perversely complex stuff, see pages 2 and 3 in the company of your accountant and a large bottle of valium".

Meanwhile, for some time I've been meaning to find some proper work again, i.e. the kind of gainful employment which requires the wearing of trousers and possibly some form of shirt (though I draw the line at neckties). This is quite an easy thing to procrastinate at, given the splendid autumn weather and Berlin's ridiculously low cost of living, but Mrs. Penguin thinks I should stop annoying the cat with my elaborate practical jokes and get out of the house more often. With impeccable timing a mail arrived late one night from a former colleague - we'll call him S. - now living in a hot and sultry coup-infested capital city in southeast Asia, asking whether I had any plans for the autumn and if not would I like to be flown over there for a couple of weeks and poke around at their software installations. I don't think that was quite what Mrs. Penguin was imagining, and my northern European genes are more suited to bracing tramps across high moors than hot and sticky conurbations in the tropics, but I see the supermarkets here are just preparing to put heating coal on sale and they will even pay me to take a taxi to and from the airport (though only an economy class flight, I hasten to add) , so my answer was a rhetorical one along involving acts of arboreal ursine excretion.

Dunno whether I'll have time for any serious blogging, so if you don't see any entries here for a couple of weeks, that means I'm busy - either working or being mugged by a gang of post-op transvestites.