Workaholic Dad

The wife and I have decided it was time to enter the 21st century in the technology department and are getting ourselves some Blackberries. I have been a blackberry user since day one always having one for work – but up to this day never for other ventures and private fun. Aside from my work blackberry I have never carried another mobile phone ever since I can remember, but there comes a time when there is more to to staying connected to other obligations than you can get away with doing on your company issued one when you’re on the go.

The Mrs. currently has a PocketWeb from 1und1.de which quite frankly is the biggest piece of shit ever created. We went on a search for new Blackberry for her and where happy to see that 1und1 carries them at very reasonable rates.

I armed myself with all the paperwork for the existing Pocketweb cpntract and dialed 1und1. It didn’t take long to get to the first prompt to enter my customer number and it didn’t recognize mine. I hung up the phone after trying the number right there on my original contract three times and went to look at one of the bills. Ah ha….a different customer number. The system didn’t recognize that either.

After what seemed 2 days of wading through a combination of keypad menus and voice prompts Eureka, finally a human being. This nice young man quickly found my contracts (we have several with the company….web hosting, domains, internet service… you name it) and informed me that normally it would be no problem to upgrade to the Blackberry service but that my contracts was with Vodafone.

Excuse me? Apparently the older customers had service through Vodafone even if they where 1und1 customers. The SIM cards are from Vodafone and we have to cancel with them. Nice folks – you would think that once you get your own SIM cards perhaps you might want to let your customers either have one of yours- the party I have a contract with – or let us know that we are just getting billed by you but are under service by someone else.

So we went ahead and ordered the Mrs. a Blackberry from 1und1 anyway because they have the cheapest rates for her phone activity. Almost exclusively data and only a call here or there.

Monday I have to call Vodafone and see about upgrading the PocketWeb contract. I also have another contract with them for a really cheap low key back-up phone the Mrs has been using. Perhaps I can roll both of those into one Blackberry contract and not pay a dime more then I pay now. That would be sweet.

I am looking forward to arriving in the 21st century – are you addicted to your crackberry? Tell me about it.

As I have written about a few months ago, the German pencil pushers had some objections with our choice of name for the little one. Apparently the names we had picked out where to unisex for them and we either had to change it or pick a third first name that was clearly male or female. Forget about using Maria over here, it’s also both male and female. Very confusing.

Anyways, we initially intended to take up the Standesamt’s suggestion to “go ahead and sue us” but not only did it turn out be a real bitch to find a good lawyer that wasn’t a media whore but also there would be a government imposed name until the trial ended. That government imposed name would have been “Unamed Child”, most certainly not an option. We then settled with the folks at the registrars office in leaving the first two names, Mackenzie Skye, alone and tacking on Anne. The Mrs’ middle name.

This morning I called my friend at the Standesamt in Hanau to ask if mom and baby would have to come along  She recognized me immediately, much to my surprise, and told me to show up without the family, papers in hand and she would have me on my way in 5 minutes.

I got to city hall and was amazed at the size of the place. I have never been there before since most government business that has to be completed is done in the city hall of our little village. I made my way to room 213 and was pleasantly surprised that I didn’t have to wait. The Mrs. and I had already filled out all the paperwork at the hospital and now it was only a matter of a few photocopies. As promised the process of making Mackenzie Skye Anne took less than 5 minutes. Once we receive all the paperwork in the mail we can make an appointment with the US Embassy to make our little mudblood a US Citizen too. Before you send me hatemail, I don’t mean mudblood derogatory just a nod to the fact that she is of mixed heritage.

This is something I have been meaning to write about all week, but now I am glad I waited until this afternoon. While I was sick I went for a morning walk with the dog and ran into one of Ayla’s best friends – Maya, a 2 year old Bernes Mountain Dog -and her owner. We walked the dogs together and Maya’s owner got me caught up on the newest gossip in town. Apparently one of their friend’s daughter got herself knocked up at the ripe old age of 13 – the father being a 15 year old Kurdish boy from school. Nice. I think I would be frontpage news on the news websites for having gone on a killing rampage if that was my daughter. Seriously without wanting to be judgmental, where did you go wrong as a parent when something like that happens?

That wasn’t enough though – not only did she know a 13 year old pregnant girl, but a 15 year old daughter of acquaintances of their’s was also pregnant. Wowzer! Both of them had abortions – the 15 year old a late-term abortion in Holland, since she didn’t tell her parents soon enough.

There is a group of skeevy stoner teens hanging out around our town. Seeing them always brings back a few memories of Miami during the Hip Hop convention. Baggie Pants, baggie shirts, ball caps, bling bling, the whole ensemble, completed with the scent of sweet sweet chiba. These kids are so gangsta….NOT! Anyways, we had seen a girl from that group around 17 yrs old with a baby in tow a few times during the summer – well, when we took the dog for a walk this morning we saw her and another girl from the group out together pushing their kids around in strollers.

Oh man, I so look forward to raising a baby girl – at this rate I will need to give her the birds and the bee talk at age 4…yikes.

The saga about naming our little one continues. It has been 6 weeks since I sent an email to the city’s register’s office asking them to review their decision not to allow us to call our daughter Mackenzie Skye. I decided yesterday that I had enough of waiting for a reply and  contacted the relevant person again to ask if maybe she had overlooked (yeah right) my email. I attached my previous email which gave a multitude of links which prove that a)Mackenzie is a real name and b) that in the country of our heritage it is a common girls name.

To my surprise I got an email early this morning from the “head” of the registries office. It is in German, but I feel that I need to paste it in here:

Sehr geehrter Herr xxx,

meine Kollegin Frau xxx hat Ihnen nun in mehren Schreiben mitgeteilt, dass der Standesbeamte sich bei der Anzeige der Vornamen darüber vergewissern muss, dass dem Kind keine Vornamen erteilt werden die ihrem Wesen nach keine Vornamen sind und dass für “Knaben nur männliche und für Mädchen nur weibliche Vornamen gewählt werden”. Lässt ein Vorname Zweifel über das Geschlecht des Kindes aufkommen, so ist zu verlangen, dass dem Kind ein weiterer, den Zweifel ausschließender Vorname beigelegt wird. Da sowohl der Vorname “Mackenzie” als auch “Skye” diese Zweifel aus hiesiger Sicht nicht ausschließen, möchten wir Sie bitten, Ihrem Kind zu gegebener Zeit einen dritten Vornamen beizulegen.

Sollte Ihr Kind in Hanau zur Welt kommen und das hiesige Standesamt müsste die Geburt beurkunden, so würden wir eine entsprechende Beurkundung ggf. auch schriftlich ablehnen.

Sie haben selbstverständlich dann die Möglichkeit, den Standesbeamten gem. § 45 Personenstandsgesetz (PStG) durch das Amtsgericht anweisen zu lassen eine entsprechende Beurkundung vorzunehmen.

Wir möchten Sie jedoch bitten, auch im Interesse Ihres Kindes, die von Ihnen beabsichtigte Vornamensgebung nochmals zu überdenken.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Werner <xxx>

Standesbeamter

Now, what is he trying to tell me here – let’s examine this letter piece by piece:

1) My colleague has emailed you several times that the names can not be used – uhm, no… she sent me one email, I responded once and asked her to review about a dozen references to prove that Mackenzie is predominantly a girls name. No response from her since then. On a funny aside, their book of names was compiled in 1988.

2) Mackenzie and Skye are considered Unisex names in Germany and can not be used – I don’t care what they say they are, afterall it is common for Boys to have the second name Maria here. Also, Mackenzie was the 22nd most popular girls name in the US last year – for boys it was somewhere in the range of 900 to 1000th most popular.

3) If you want to have the kid in this town, we will deny the name – Ok well – perhaps time to contact the registry office in other towns nearby. We are only minutes away from about 10 towns with first rate hospitals – doesn’t hurt to call around and see what other register’s offices say. There is no law that requires them to use a specific list afterall.

4) You can go to court if you want to fight us on this – § 45 Personenstandsgesetz (PStG), good to know… if he hadn’t mentioned that I would have probably given in for lack of knowledge.

5) “We would like to ask you, in the interest of your child, to pick different names for her.” – Who the fuck are you to judge what name is right for my kid?!?!?

Well, my response to them “FUCK YOU” – of course I worded it differently when I called the guy back asking for clarification. When I asked him if they do this game with other foreign names (for example Turkish, Russian, etc.) he plainly stated “NO”. Ergo, this little toadlicker is discriminating against US citizens and names originating from the english language. I am just glad I work at a brokerage – every call is taped.

The Mrs. called the US embassy to check if there was any help they could provide in the matter. The person to handle those requests wasn’t there, but I found it encouraging that the switchboard operator wasn’t surprised by the nature of the call. In fact, she said that they received many such calls. Perhaps that is an encouraging sign and they may actually be able to provide us with some assistance in the matter.

If they can’t help I fully intend to get a lawyer to take care of this buerocratic absurdity. I am outraged by the tone of voice and plain disintert towards US citizens – something that unfortunately has been a growing issue here. I might just have to call the Bild Zeitung to run an article about this issue.

We’ll see how this saga turns out – unfortunately after googleing the issue, I have come across a ton of people that have to deal with power tripping civil servants dictating which name works and which doesn’t. Personally, I am not amused at all – afterall, these people are payed to protect the interest of the people, not control their lives.

Over here in Germany when a child is born, you have to go to the city registers office for the official birth certificate. When you apply for the birth certificate you have to pick a name for the child, which in turn needs to be approved by the clerk. In our case, we chose the name Mackenzie Skye for our little baby girl. It took a long time to come up with a middle name, since we have wanted to name our daughter for as long as we have been together – 8 years – and need to make it fit to our very German last name.

After browsing many name pages and saying her full name out loud and thinking up what perception the name would bring we figured it might be tough to get the name approved.

Exactly one month ago today I sent an email to the city clerk asking for approval of the name. A week went by and I hadn’t heard anything – big surprise. Reluctantly I picked up the phone and dialed their number, well within business hours posted on their website, and was surprised that no one picked up. I tried again several times over the course of the next few days – nothing. Then finally, much to my surprise, an actual human being picked up the phone. After a little bit of chit chat I was told Mackenzie can be both a boys and a girls name so by itself it wouldn’t work. Skye on the other hand I was told is only a guy’s name, so no dice. How she arrived at the conclusion that Skye is exclusively a guys name is beyond me, but she must have her reasons.

Our alternative – add a third first name that is exclusively and positively a girls name. Now to me this seems like a perfect opportunity to pick the ugliest, most horrible name, given that besides the birth certificate she would never be called that name anyways. But my wife isn’t sold on that idea just yet, she thinks it would be cruel and unusual punishment.

But back to the story. I browsed the internet and put together a few links for her which show that Mackenzie is indeed a very popular girls name – number 22 on the popularity scale for 2007 – and a few references that Skye is indeed a girls name as well. I sent this email 2 weeks ago and to this day I have not heard back.

At this point Fellula, Gertrud and Ursula sound pretty good as a third first name, what do you think?