Turkish Bureaucratic Ailment is a plague in this country. Better known as TBA, Turkish Bureaucratic Ailment seems to be a disease that is contracted by most foreigners who spend more than a few weeks in the country. My own battle with TBA is a long and exhaustive one - and since Turkey has not yet switched to universal health care (though I don't think TBA would be covered under that, either, without the proper paperwork), my energy, spirit, and wallet has suffered from the experience. Having finally (mostly) recovered, I would like to share my story.
I began to exhibit signs of TBA on February 6, 2012. But I was infected many weeks earlier. Please allow me to digress...
No interruptions.
***
The year was 2011. I was preparing to leave the United States for a semester abroad in Istanbul. My parents, in their infinite wisdom (I mean this sincerely) insisted that I not bring my computer to Eastern Europe, where I was to be traveling for a few weeks prior to my arrival in Istanbul. It seemed the prudent thing to ship the computer, along with a few extras that I would need for school (like extra clothes, some random books, an obnoxiously massive American flag, a few sweatshirts for the remainder of the winter. Basically anything I might need at school but couldn't fit into my backpack).
Of course, we shipped it with a reputable service (FedEx), insured it for way more than the total package was worth ($2390) and even made the prudent decision to send the package only after my arrival at the Superdorm and the start of my program, as Duke had warned us that the Turkish mail system is unreliable at best, and the Superdorm would not hold packages that arrive earlier than the student.
So, with what we thought were all of our bases covered, I arrived in Istanbul on January 29, 2012, without a computer, after a month in Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Even now, it was probably a good thing I wasn't carrying around a theft magnet like a year-old Macbook Pro through the former Soviet Bloc.
A few days later, my parents shipped out the package. This brings us back to February 6, when the package arrived.
***
I received a call in my room from one of the guards in the Superdorm lobby. He informed me that a package has arrived. With glee, I rambled down the three flights of stairs, grasping the poles at the bottom of each set of stairs, jumping and swinging myself around to continue my descent uninterrupted - I love receiving mail, and this particular package had a lot to be desired inside of it.
It was not a package. It was an envelope from FedEx. In Turkish. I assumed it is related to the package I was expecting, but I had no way to translate it yet (short of painstakingly typing the whole letter into Google Translate, which I tried. But I failed). Assuming I had a little time to get the package, I left the letter on my desk for a few days. In retrospect, early detection is key to curing TBA, and I made a terrible mistake in not immediately trying to remedy this situation.
***
Fast forward to February 9. Duke was taking us on a weeklong excursion to southern Turkey. Our morning flight was cancelled, and we spent 15 hours or so at Atatürk Airport. At some point, I pulled out the letter and showed it to Karanfil, one of my professors this semester, and one of the Duke program's chaperones.
According to Karanfil's translation of the letter from FedEx, the package had arrived and was waiting at Atatürk Airport customs. I had the choice of coming to pick up the package myself, or to pay 150TL ($84.25) for someone to deliver it to me. I reacted with the instinctual, "Well, when we get back from the trip I can just pick it up here at the airport, and bring it back with me!" But Karanfil wisely told me that there might be all kinds of legal trip-ups along the way, and if she was given the opportunity to pay someone only 150TL to deliver the package to me, she would pay it in a second. Either way, we did not have to deal with that until we got back from our trip; the package deadline, according to the letter, was 20 days after arrival, or February 26. We would be back with plenty of time to spare. I wasn't worried, though I felt a small pang in my gut. That was either another early warning sign of TBA, or the parasite I had contracted from drinking the tap water that I would deal with over the following week. But that's a different matter.
***
The date was now February 15. 11 days until deadline. I spoke at length with Sarah Carpenter, who has been deftly running our program from well before Day 1, and she graciously offered to give the FedEx people a call for me, to figure out just what I needed to do to get the package.
I received the bad news that night. Well, some of it, as one of the distinctive symptoms of TBA is a tendency to get way worse before it gets better -- if it gets better. It seems that in order to get the package, I would have to not only pay 150TL in additional shipping fees, but an additional 75 € ($100) for a third party company to fill out the necessary paperwork to retrieve the package. I reluctantly agreed, mentally racking up the amount of money this little ordeal had already added up to. But that wasn't all.
***
It was now almost a week after that. February 21 or so. I receive a call from Sarah, who has been on the phone all day with FedEx and some company that does the sort of thing that we needed them to do, namely, get my package out of customs. It seems my problems at this point were two-fold:
1) I was to be taxed for the contents of the box before it could be delivered, based on the insured value (though... it was over-insured!) of the items inside, because that insured value exceeded whatever price was necessary to give the package a commercial designation - which meant I needed to pay taxes as if I bought it in Turkey. That tax, based on Turkish sales tax, was somewhere around 18%, or 850TL ($477). Officially, the price to get the package back had about equalled/probably exceeded the cost of shipping.
2) The company that gave us this information was unable to do anything else for us, until I officially hired them. Which I couldn't do without a notarized power of attorney document, authorizing them to work on my behalf.
So, with a grimace on my face (this time from TBA, not my parasite named Brian), I resolved to find me a notary.
***
February 23rd, 2012. 3 days until deadline.
A friend on my program, Savannah, was cleverly tricked into accompanying me to the notary office in Etiler, a wealthy district adjacent to the Superdorm area. We took the bus a few stops, found the road between the two Günaydın restaurants (yes, there are two adjacent Günaydın restaurants), and turned left at the first opportunity to find the little Noter office.
Of course, no one inside spoke Turkish, so I called Sarah up to translate for me. She tried, but when I got back on the phone with her after her talk with the man behind the desk, she informed me that my identity could not be confirmed without a translated passport (basically a notarized paper with my passport information translated into Turkish on it), and that I could not sign a power of attorney without having the contents explained to me by a translator. Sarah offered to be that translator, but apparently they only go through official channels for this sort of thing. So they put me on the phone with İrfan Özdabak, a Tercüme & Danişmanlık (translator and consultant - though I still get no end of fun from the latter title).
İrfan informed me that I should bring my passport down to his office in Rumeli (by the University South Campus, basically the same distance from the Superdorm I was at but on the other side), and we'd figure all this stuff out.
The next thing we know, Savannah and I are in a book-infested apartment with little blue plastic booties over our shoes, chatting with İrfan while he translated my passport. It turns out he graduated from SUNY Binghamton, like my mother, but that's unimportant. He then explained to me the contents of a power of attorney which, amazingly enough, are almost identical to a power of attorney in the United States.
With a translated passport in hand, Savannah and I made our way back to the notary. A few minutes after our arrival, İrfan shows up behind us to finish up the last of what we need to do. He certifies the passport translation to be accurate, they stamp it, and they charge me 62TL ($34.80) for the stamp (Oh, and İrfan charged me 30TL ($16.84) for the translation, plus 50TL ($28.06) for explaining to me the power of attorney and coming down to the notary to help me out). Next, they had İrfan tell them that he explained the power of attorney, and they let me sign that, too, with the small fee of 85TL ($47.70) for the stamp tacked on.
I left the notary thoroughly sickened, though confident that all was finally right with the world. I could hire this company to do my dirty work now. I called Sarah to inform her, and she called the company to give them the go ahead.
I went to Nexus, my favorite bar in the area, to drown my sorrows in 13 tequila shots.
***
I woke up the following day thoroughly ill. I do not blame the alcohol for that in the slightest - it was clearly all the fault of my ever-worsening TBA. And it was about to get terminal.
I was sitting in Karanfil's class, cursing my aching brain that was rotting only from TBA, when I received some information from Sarah. I stepped outside to call her.
As it turns out, my third party company had discovered a little snag in the system (because everything thus far had gone so smoothly). In order to receive the package, I would need to obtain two items. The first was a tax ID. This is easy. I can go to any tax office in Istanbul and get a tax ID within minutes. The second was a residents permit. This was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. I had no residents permit.
See, the Turkish student visa I arrived with counts as a single entry visa. Within one month of arrival, I must apply for a residents permit. Duke insisted that we didn't need to worry about that appointment for a little while (until towards the end of our first month), so we didn't. And to their credit, appointments had never been backed up more than a week or two in the past. But when we went to sign up, the earliest appointments were in May. I got the earliest day of anyone on my program, and that was May 7! More on that in the Epilogue of this tome.
Without a residence permit, I would be unable to retrieve the package before the deadline. Even if this company could weasel me into a residence permit, it would take a week to process and I would be beyond my 20-day deadline, which would result in the accumulation of all sorts of late fees for leaving a package in customs for more than 3 weeks.
I made a snap decision in this moment. It took some serious thinking and a little mental math, but I had to make a call.
It would cost 850TL to pay the taxes on the damn thing. It would also cost 75€ to keep this company on retainer to get the package, plus 150TL to deliver it. I've been over these costs before, but I felt I should reiterate. Because, as it turns out, to ship the damn thing home to the US would be cheaper. So I made the call.
But I had an epiphany! In just a few short weeks, I would be receiving a different sort of shipment, in the form of a friend from school coming to Istanbul for Spring Break! So I asked Sarah to have the package shipped instead to Sophie in St. Louis, and from there she could put the contents in a suitcase and carry the items to me for free (well, relatively speaking). Such a simple solution...
***
A few days later, the package was back on its way to St. Louis, with plenty of time to spare before Sophie's departure. I even saved some money on shipping and managed to get my notary fees refunded. And then I woke up.
We had succeeded in getting the late fees from customs mostly waved (since I was no longer attempting to get the package through customs), and weren't going to have to pay the 850TL in taxes, nor the 150TL in additional shipping costs. But the successes stop there.
It's now February 28. I receive a call from my father, informing me that he had gotten a phone call which demanded $900 or so for return shipping by 5pm EST or "the package will be destroyed." I had never gotten a ransom call before, and this was a bit of a shock on my system, already so taxed by TBA. But we called the weird, non-FedEx shipping company back and argued a lot. Well, my father did on my behalf. I was a little weakened by the disease.
I was not privy to the negotiations, but it turns out that MNG Kargo, FedEx's partners in Turkey, would end up quoting me 395€ ($527) for return shipping, plus 295TL ($47.70) for customs fees. Those broke down as follows:
Brokerage and warehouse: 75TL
Terminal fee: 85TL
Export warehouse fee: 55TL
Government stamp: 25TL
Master airway bill: 55TL
Ah, and we would need to send an AGR form (whatever that is) filled out to MNG/FedEx and letters from the original sender and from me indicating our wish to see it returned.
At this point I was coordinating with Irene, one of my father's coworkers. Together we filled out the AGR form and wrote multiple emails (they kept making us resend them) indicating our wish to have the package returned to the US and rerouted to St. Louis.
Hopefully, problem solved. We would now play the waiting game...
***
March 6, 2012. 9 days past original deadline. 3 days until Sophie's departure for Istanbul.
I receive an email from Irene, saying that FedEx wants us to send them the address to send the box to, again. I gave them Sophie's address, but at this point there was no way it was going to make it in time for her departure. No matter, at least it would be there when I got back from Turkey, and not destroyed.
My TBA was flaring up again... I had at this point been without my computer (or any computer, for that matter) for over 2 months, and had been only a few miles away from it for a month of that time. And now I wouldn't receive it at all.
But there was a silver lining. Sophie had an extra computer, and graciously agreed to let me borrow it for a semester. It is on that device I now write this little story of mine.
***
Sophie arrived on March 10, 2012. No word on the package. Upon her departure from Istanbul, though, while she was on the plane home on March 19, in fact, I received this email from Irene:
"Return tracking number 489922252968
The package was actually delivered today in St Louis -- K. Simon signed
for it at 1038am in the mailroom"
K. Simon, my hero. A man for whom no amount of distance nor red tape could be a burden. This man who was willing to go out of his way to help me, an ailing victim of TBA, with the most urgent of problems.
Granted, I still don't have any of that stuff, and now I'm living out of a single backpack for the entire semester, but at least all my stuff, my computer most importantly, is back in St. Louis. It only took 42 days, more money than I care to add up, and far too many hours. The saga was over.
***
But my TBA was not.
***
Remember how I couldn't get a residence permit until May 7? The Turkish Bureaucratic Ailment had reared its ugly head a second time, interfering with my package-getting abilities and also with part of the reason I came to Turkey to begin with: to be a stones throw from other cities and countries I want to visit. If I can't leave the country, how will I ever see Athens? Cyprus? Bulgaria? Cairo? Clearly I most likely won't get to any or all of them, but the option is what matters.
Anyway, shortly after leap day, I was frustrated with my May 7th appointment. And no, it wasn't ONLY because 1,454 years ago on that day, the dome of the Hağia Sofia collapsed here in Constantinople, or that 97 years ago on that day the Lusitania was torpedoed and sank. I was frustrated because I was going to be forced to pay (yes, you must pay a lot) for my residence permit and would only have a maximum of 4 weeks to use it before leaving the country for good. And most of that time is during finals. What use is that?
So I made a half-court shot with my eyes closed. I booked another appointment for a slot that didn't have as long a waiting list. I skipped over the heavily-booked long-term residence appointments and student visa residence appointments, and booked a March 21 appointment for University Faculty. Why? Why not?
On the fateful day, I awoke at 5:00am. Vatan'da Emniyet Müdürlüğü, where I would have to go, is about 1.5 hours from the Superdorm, and I had an 8am appointment. I arrived around 7:15am. Better early, right?
Wrong. Bureaucracy always runs late. The policemen who receive you didn't even show up until 8:15. I had gotten through security, gotten lost in the building with the most massive Turkish flag ever woven flying on top, and made it to the appointment spot with 30 minutes to spare before I even saw another human face in that office.
The office consists of a bunch of glass-divided windows lining one corridor, a room with more glass-dividers along the middle corridor (though separated from the rest of the area by sections of actual wall), and a row of chairs lining the third corridor, with a larger waiting area with more chairs branching off of that. Here, I sat for 2 hours while numbers were being called. I was 504. They started with 1, which freaked me out at first until I realized that the one guy doing University Faculty started at 500. Still, it took 2 hours before 504 was called.
I was immediately turned away. Hadn't printed out my appointment page. Kind of hard to do that when you only just got a computer, so you didn't even have the appointment page until two days prior.
I went downstairs and had mine printed for an absurd 8TL (2 pages!). Undaunted, I returned to booth #16.
I was waiting behind a professor who kindly offered to help me organize my things to make sure I had everything I had. Four passport photos: check. Passport: check. Appointment pages: check. Copies of my passport and visa pages: check. Copy of my employment contract with my University: uncheck.
He told me I had made a mistake. I started to explain to him that I couldn't have, I had made the appointment weeks ago and needed to get my permit immediately. He explained that, "since your Turkish is a little poor, you misread 'Öğretim,' or 'teaching' as 'Öğrenci,' or 'student' (Because when I went through the English version of the appointment-making website, this was definitely printed there). I sheepishly admitted that yes, I must have made that mistake. I begged the man for help. I actually told him I had TBA, and that I might need to go to the U.S. for treatment! He translated to the policeman at window #16, and I was waved down to #18, to someone who spoke English.
"Are you Erasmus?"
"Yes."
"Are you Erasmus?"
"Well, no. Exchange student."
"Come back at 3."
It was that quick, and that annoying. I had 5 hours to kill at this point. Including an hour and fifteen minutes to make it back to campus for my Historiography class. So I made that attempt. But by the time I had taken a bus to the tramway, and the tramway to Kabataş, it was almost 11. I wouldn't have made it until at least 11:30, halfway through the class. I called Isabelle instead, who was in Sultanahmet with a friend, and hung out with them for a bit.
I headed back around 1:30 to Vatan. I pushed my way to booth #18, where I was asked about Erasmus again. I stumbled, wanting to say yes to make things easier, but when pressed I admitted my lack of Erasmus status.
"Ok," he said, angrily. "If you were Erasmus, I wouldn't do this."
He filled out some sheets and stapled a picture of me to the page, signed something, had me sign something, then sent me with the papers to the cashier. Here I was made to pay 172TL ($96.50) in cash (which I had to run downstairs to get from an ATM). With the receipt in hand, though, I was sent back to #18. Many several minutes later, I was told, "come back one week, give this, get permit." I was handed my passport and two sheets of paper; receipts for my permit. I had succeeded.
I walked back to the tramway instead of taking the bus. It was a nice day, and I was feeling better about my TBA than I had in weeks.
***
Today is March 28. I got out of my Turkish midterm at 10. I went to a commiseration brunch of Menemen at White Castle (Beyaz Kale) with my fellow Turkish-language students Isabelle, Brennan, and Sean. I showed up for Historiography but the professor was more than 15 minutes late, and every student left the room. So I followed. Hopped a bus, then tram, then metro to Vatan. I arrived at 20 to 1pm. Of course, they were on their lunch break.
After their lunch, a few policemen showed up and started handing out permits. I was called in, made to sign something, and was handed a little booklet to go with my passport. I can officially leave the country. Which is good, because I had already booked a trip to Georgia this weekend.
And later this same evening, Sophie has officially informed me that, "[Michael] Warford is taking it [the package] to your house tonight".
My TBA has finally been beaten.
I am in remission.
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