I HATE Belgium

I HATE Belgium. Officially. I HATE the constant summons to the Commune, to be snubbed by some fat, pea-brained Belgian local government pen-pusher with a large salary and no sense of initiative*. I HATE being asked to provide a different document each time and then when I arrive being told that it's the wrong one and I am late and I should have brought Annex X blah blah blah.

I HATE that I have to pay over two thousand euros in social security per year - effectively paying the salaries and child benefits of the fat, brainless local government penpushers - when I have absolutely no intention of retiring here or withdrawing a Belgian state pension.

I HATE the look of simple contempt I got from the fat local government penpusher this morning, simply for being a foreign woman who dared to speak up to him in his own language.

P: Here, my declaration of revenue for last year. Hands over tax declaration.
Fat official: That's no good. I need a monthly declaration.
P: Divide it by twelve! It's a valid declaration of my earnings.
Fat official: It doesn't count. You need a monthly declaration.

Please note, that the Fat, Stupid Official simply kept repeating the same words, over and over, without attempting to explain or justify anything. Because when your salary and social security contributions are guaranteed for life by the Belgian government, you don't have to be polite to people or to think outside the box. No-one is going to fire him, it's too difficult. All he has to do is slump like a fat dollop of stoemp in front of his computer all day and be obnoxious to foreign girls.

See what I mean?! Fat and stupid, all of them. I spend my hard-earned euros here, in their country, paying their extortionate sales VAT rate, and there they are, treating me like a piece of dirt on the bottom of their shoes!

I HATE that - although I have every right to be here, as a European citizen with freedom of movement - they decide to make it as difficult as possible for me to function here. Why do I need to register anyway? I pay my rent, I have enough to eat, why do I need one of your silly little identity cards when I have a perfectly good British passport thank you? And what makes you think I'm so desperate to be a Belgian resident anyway? I would love it if work were located in London and I could simply bypass all this ridiculous bureaucracy altogether. Believe me, I am not here for fun!

I HATE that the 'Capital of Europe' has to be this bureaucratically pedantic little city, when it could be in Paris, Florence, London, Kraków, Berlin... Europe has so many beautiful and lively cities. Why does it have to be hateful Belgium?!

I HATE Belgium!

*what did you think I was going to say?!

Mobistar

I've been using Mobistar for my mobile phone (including mobile internet) and home broadband - both essential for my business - since I got here, and it is the least reliable telephone company I have ever had the misfortune to be involved with. (Incidentally Mobistar is part of Orange, or the France Telecom Group and I have to admit that Orange UK are slightly better: this is to neutralise the fact that the pedants among you will probably point out that they are one and the same thing and therefore it can't be the worst company I've ever used, etc.)

For starters, the internet connection quality is rubbish. The speed of streaming at home is appalling: you can't listen video speeches in any language and YouTube is a write-off.

On the mobile, I can only connect to the web via 'Orange World', which is constantly on the blink, meaning my mobile internet service is unreliable to say the least.

And finally you simply can't get through to Customer Service. I've actually got up during a Mobistar call, walked to the Mobistar shop on Rue de Tongres, and still been on hold on arrival (although that's only about ten minutes).

Bizarrely, every so often someone from Mobistar will call me, for some unfathomable reason, with some totally irrelevant question about how I am enjoying my subscription. I tell them it's pants, and they inform me that a customer service representative will call me back in a few days.

They never do.

Mobistar, your service is crap. Call me.

Red Belgium

First I started a humorous post about the disastrous city of Antwerp. Then I wrote a draft about friendly bus drivers in Ghent. There was even another in the oft-deleted 'How to flirt with a feminist' series.

But what you're actually going to get today is another Rant.

I just spent the morning flitting among the crowded cubicles of PartenaMut. This is a health insurance entity which seems to sort out all sorts of things like social security for freelancers, health care, etc, etc. I just want to be able to go to the doctor, basically.

Now at the moment my business is registered in the UK, since that's been my home/business address for the past year or so. I have a tax ID there, I pay National Insurance, I even have an accountant of sorts (at least, I have a contact at Tax Assist, which is sort of the tax return equivalent of Easyjet). I'm not registered for VAT, because my business is literally worth about twelve grand a year and because my overheads barely reach a thousand pounds, so it would be an expensive and largely useless gesture which would result in my losing clients.

I fully intend to register myself in Belgium, but not before I have to.

Here's the thing: to interpret in Belgium, I have to have an address in Belgium, otherwise clients are obliged to pay my travel expenses to avoid unfair competition (and I'm in favour of this, since I think interpreters should have their travel expenses paid and this is all very right and good).
However, if I have an address in Belgium, that means that I have to live in Belgium (the police already came around to check) and subsequently pay taxes in Belgium. Since I'm already going to have to pay taxes this year in the UK, I'll end up in the kind of double-taxation situation that the good old U of E is supposed to prevent.

Social security, now there's an interesting concept. I am fed up with paying extortionate social security contributions in other European Union Member States when there's not even the faintest likelihood of my drawing a pension there (not that I'd want to, in Poland OAPs' weekly incomes are minute). Since I graduated in 2006 I've paid contributions in both France and Poland and it looks likely that I'll now have to pay in Belgium as well, and all for what exactly? I still have to pay into a mutual fund to get my prescriptions reimbursed. Call me when there's a pan-European transferable pension scheme and I'll be happy to pay you upwards of 600 Euros per quarter.

Because, yes, that's the lowest social security contribution here.

As a self-employed person in the UK, I currently pay around 30 GBP per quarter in National Insurance. And I can visit the doctor there without taking my credit card or a wad of cash.

In Belgium, the lowest income bracket (11,824.38 per year, don't ask me how they came to this figure), net of income tax, which corresponds roughly to my situation, pays 631.45 euros of social security per quarter - that's four times a year! That would leave that person with 92,98.58 euros in their pocket (have we already subtracted VAT?)!

I'm giving up work altogether. Why on earth do I bother working like stink and learning difficult Slavic languages and quite possibly incubating stress-related heart disease to emerge in my forties, when I might as well sit at home on my derrière and claim 900 euros a month in unemployment benefit? I could spend my days reading Polityka on the sofa, uninterrupted by phonecalls from tiresome translation companies!

I have never lived in a country less favourable to private enterprise (apart from France).

I see a twofold choice ahead of me: I move back to my parents' house and get a job in McDonalds (pray tell me, why did I take out a fortune in loans for an education that has turned out to be largely useless?) or... I move back to Krakow, continue working under my UK registered company and simply pay for cheap private healthcare in zloty...

Are you being served?

One - pretty important - thing I haven't mentioned yet is Belgian Customer Service.

Now please, bear in mind I've just spent the past two years (more or less) living in a former Eastern Bloc country. While cities such as Kraków are very modern and Central European and sophisticated, they still have their fair share of grumpy old Panie Nie Ma, glaring protectively over their hoards of small change in those little post-Communist Sklepy Spożywcze with the green bars on the windows.

I really thought that Belgium, with its Mutualités and its cycle lanes and 'journées sans voitures' and general touchy-feelyness might be a little different.

What a fool I was. Let's not mention the pharmacies that insist on selling you a packet of ten capsules when all you need is one (without social security- still waiting - that's pretty steep). Or the Belgacom shopkeeper whose sales pitch I had to draw out of him, step by painful step (- no, I mean, couldn't you tell me the advantages of Belgacom over Clearwire? Is it more... uh... reliable, for example? Yes?).

No, I'm afraid this last episode has finally convinced me that Belgian customer service is officially The Worst In Europe.

I needed an ironing board.
Perhaps it is not entirely to my credit that it has taken me over a month to come to this conclusion.

Not having an awful lot of time at my disposal, I preferred not to waste it tramping the desolate backstreets of Etterbeek during daytime tv hours, so I looked up the number of the big(ger) Carrefour online.

- Bonjour, c'est bien Carrefour St Michel?
- Ouais.
- Est-ce que vous auriez par hazard des planches à repasser?
- Attendez j'en sais rien, faut que je vous passe...
Music. For several minutes. And then a flat dialling tone.

I would clearly have to leave the flat after all.

I braved the drizzle and stepped out into the greyness...

***

This was a much bigger Carrefour than the little local round the corner, full of exciting things (toasters made in China, shiny plastic kettles from Romania). After some effort, I found the domestic appliances section.

No ironing boards. The price tag was still on the shelf though.

I made my way to the customer services desk, where a stout woman in an overall was slumped on a high chair at one of those supervisor stations.

- Excuse me... there aren't any ironing boards on the shelf - do you have any in stock?
The woman raised her eyes - not without some effort - from her magazine.
- If it's not on the shelf, then we don't have it.
I tried again.
- Couldn't you ask? Please?
Sighing, she picked up the phone.
- He's coming.
She said, and - sitting back dismissively - opened her magazine, leaving me standing there speechless in front of her.

If I had dared to pull that trick as a sixth-former on a summer job in Sainsbury's, they'd have flayed me alive.

I faked a text message and took a picture:

My phone let out a resounding 'click', but if Pani Sprzedawczyni noticed, she gave no sign of caring.

So here it is ladies and gentlemen: pictorial evidence that Belgian Customer Service is officially The Worst In Europe.

For the record, a guy in overalls then appeared from the warehouse, led me back to the rayon planches a repasser and - very kindly - went back into the warehouse to check whether the new delivery had arrived yet. It had, and as a result I had a lot of fun trying to manoeuvre my new purchase to the self-scan checkout without upsetting any pyramids of baked beans (here? as if!) or braining any under-fives.