How I Cut Through the Gordion Knot of German Bureaucracy and Got Vaccinated

I ought to be first in line. Really. I'm in my sixties and have metastatic breast cancer. Granted, I feel fine and live a normal life, but I'm not in the first bloom of youth. So I checked the local list and I was supposedly in Group Two--Group One being doctors, teachers, therapists. My boss wrote me a letter. No dice. My oncologist wrote me a letter and filled out a form. No dice. But I did, as advised, phone the vaccination center and tell them all about my letter.

    "Oh, we are sorry but . . . blah, blah, blah . . . you can try again in a few weeks."

Which I did do. And they said, 

    "Oh, we are sorry but . . .  blibber, blibber, blibber . . .  you can try again in a few weeks." Now, I happen to live right next to the testing center, so after getting my free test today (and feeling as though my nose had been electrocuted) I thought I'd just stroll right on over to the vaccine center (in a different building from the testing center, just to complicate things) and see if they threw me out.

I entered and was asked to show my ID card and the printout of my appointment--proof that I had one. Instead, I whipped out my doctor's letter and kept my face sterner than it's ever been. My face, ladies and gentlemen, looked like it was cut out of oak and I've been massaging it ever since. 

The guy at the desk looked deeply puzzled. Now, when teutonic administators get deeply puzzled, I have noticed, they do one of two things: they throw you out or they find and fill out a form you've never seen before (and neither have they, probably). He filled. I watched, waiting to be thrown out, but he waved me through to the next room, where I was stopped at a table and urged to fill out several more pages of forms. I did so. And take a number. I did. 

When they called a group of numbers I thought was 200-250, I followed those people, though, as it turns out, they'd called up to 240 and I was 241. We were seated and my number came up. Into the little booth I went, where a man who looked and sounded like Dostoevsky's Underground Man inquired whether I had my vaccination pass. This is it, I thought. Damn, so close, but now they'll throw me out. But no! He pulled out three--or was it four?--more forms and I had to fill out one while he diddled with the others. One of those forms, I realized, was my next appointment. They were offering BioNtech that day, he said. Did I have any concerns? No, I answered, my one concern having been that he would throw me out. One jab later, the doctor said I had to sit around for fifteen minutes. I did, but things were chaotic enough that I could have walked out immediately and no one would have noticed. It's been five hours since the shot. No side effects. Yet.