My dad gets a small German pension, or I should say he did get a small German pension. Every year they send a proof of life form and last year I did the form and called a mobile notary to come over and give it an official stamp and then I mailed it. Dad got one pension check and then they stopped.
I emailed all the documents again. I wrote a snail mail. I sent all the POA documents in case they needed power of attorney to deal with me. I emailed all the documents again. No response.
I had pretty much given up. What else could I do?
Then, I got a letter at my house addressed to me that said I need to do a proof of life form. While I was navigating this packet, I found a letter at Dad’s apartment from them explaining that they couldn’t mail him his pension checks because they had been returned as undeliverable.
Can we all just pause for a second on this? Let’s send a letter to the address where we’re telling you we can’t send things.
I filled out all the paperwork, got all the signatures, gathered all the things they wanted. I also took a picture of Dad holding their letter: that’s Proof of Life.
According to the instructions you can submit this all online but it’s not in English. FINE. I understand a little plus its 2024. We have Google Translate.
I commence with the website. There are lots of things to translate. It was a long and tedious process but also kind-of funny because it was like all the aggravation of doing a bureaucratic process via a confusing-to-navigate website, but also frantically cutting and pasting back and forth with Google Translate.
Inevitably, I got to the part where I had to “choose one” to tell them what form I was completing and you’ll never guess what happened? Mine wasn’t one of the choices. The form that I was filling was not there. But I had to translate about 16 choices to be sure. If you asked AI to go through every episode of I Love Lucy and then write an episode where Lucy needs to use Google Translate — this is what it would come up with.
I gave up for now. I’m going to try again after I’ve reviewed all the paperwork again and my brain is fresh.
