I spent 6 hours at the Federal Police building yesterday. Not in handcuffs or anything – just trying to obtain my temporary registration. I was supposed to register with the Federal Police within 30 days, and knowing well that this won’t be a fun experience I kept postponing it. However, today would have been the last day for me to register, so two days ago I decided it was time to go. Now, having already been through this before, I came prepared, wearing long pants and shoes. (They don’t let you in shorts or sandals and a friend of mine had to rent pants in from of the building.)

I also got my fee paid. Brazilian government is broadly recognized as “a competent user of information technology”, but this competence doesn’t spread to all levels. So, in order to pay for anything, what you do now is you go online and fill in a form, it generates a page that you print out and take to the bank where you pay the fee and get a receipt that you take to the Federal Police or whoever you need to pay. Very intelligent and convenient in theory. In practice, though, what this means is that you go to the federal police website and find no information there on registering. So you go there and ask in person. They then tell you that you need to go an find a computer with an Internet access to fill in the form. And of course they don’t have those computers in the office. Luckily you don’t actually have to go home – across the street (right next to the guy who rents out pants) there is a little shop that will do everything for you (for a fee, obviously).

But in my case I already came prepared with everything paid, etc. And wearing long pants, which is a torture when it’s 35 degrees outside. (I have no idea how Brazilians can manage to wear jeans daily.) And guess what I find: the building is closed, the police is on strike for 24 hours.

So, I come back the next day (yesterday), budgeting 3,5 hours for the process but really expecting it to be less than that and thinking what will I do until my interview at 3 p.m. From outside the Federal Police is the ugliest building in Rio (and that’s a tough competition, given some of Oscar Niemeyer’s work), situated in one of the hottest parts of Rio. But inside it’s not that ugly (though still pretty ugly) and they do have air-conditioning.

So, I look for the line and I find something quite entertaining: they've got a “sitting line” going. It’s not that you get a place in line (e.g., by pulling a number out of machine) and then take a seat. No, there have 5 rows of seats (let’s say 10 seats each), and every time someone gets up to be served everyone moves one seat over. (If you are sitting at the end of your row, you get up and move to the next row.) If you think that sounds like a lot of excercise, don’t worry: the line moves slowly. So, you only need to get up maybe every 15 minutes or so. So, I take my seat and spend the next 2-3 hours in that line. The crowd is kind of interesting – you rarely see foreigners in Rio who are not tourists or Bolivians selling stuff on the sidewalk in Copacabana. It is particularly amusing seeing foreigners talk to each other in Portuguese. Later in the day I ended up having a long conversation myself with a guy from Argentina. So, just imagine watching a Russian and an Argentinian both talk in bad Portuguese.

After 2-3 hours it’s finally my turn, so I go up. The guy looks through all of my papers slowly, tells me to correct everything. He is very nice, but does everything or so slowly. He then tells me that the background on the photos that I brought isn’t white enough and that I should go across the street and take new photos. I ask him if I would need to stay in the same line again afterwards. He says don’t worry, just leave your stuff here with me and I will wait for you. I can’t believe my luck, so I rush outside – to the same place that fills in forms on the internet, next to the guy who rents pants. There I get the fastest photo service known on the planet, I was quite impressed. So, I come back wondering if the guy is attending another client or if he is just sitting there waiting for me to come back, which would explain why the line take so long. Turns out it’s neither – he has spent this time looking up the code for Russia in a table – without success. He asks me if “Russia Branca” (“White Russia”) is the same as Russia. I tell him no, it’s a different country. He goes and talks to someone else, then finally comes back and writes some code. All along, I am having serious doubts about his reading ability, but as I discover later, it’s not his fault. There is a copy of the table up on the wall and I later have ample time (like 3 hours) to explore it, during which I become confident that Russia is not on that list. “Soviet Union” is, “Bielorussia” is, “Russia Branca” is there (which I was originally assuming was Byelorussia, but that one is listed separately). It even has various parts of Russia that are not independent countries (“Komi”, “Yakut”, “Chuvas”), but not Russia itself. They also have Czekoslovakia but not Czekia or Slovakia separately. This all reminds me of how I was crossing the border into Peru and the border guide wasn’t sure what “Russia” was and why Russians were allowed to enter Peru without a visa. He then had to look up “Russia” in some book of his, and it’s good that his book was more up-t-odate than the list in the Brazilian Federal Police!

Anyway, after they figure out the code for Russia I am told to sit down. It’s been over three hours already and I am starting to suspect that I won’t be out in less than half an hour, so I call to reschedule my interview by an hour. An hour later I call to just cancel it for today. I then start a long conversation with one of the people in line. Finally, another hour or two later (this is now full 6 hours since I arrived), I get called. They tell me that I their records tell them that they already issued me an ID card in 2005 (they are afterall “a competent user of information technology,” damn it) and they want to see it. Otherwise I need to pay a US$150 fine. The fine does turn out to be legit – they aren’t just trying to extract money from me. Unfortunately, the fine needs to be paid through the same method – go online, print the form, take it to the bank – and the police building is already closed at this point, so I can’t come back once I leave. So, apart from having to pay the fine, I am now facing another day totally wasted in line at the Police office. Great. What about the card? God knows where it is. Not like anyone told me that I need to keep it past its expiration date. And if I found the card, I would still have to come back. Of course, I could try to bypass the line claiming that I already spent my day there, but I saw a woman try to do that today and the situation approached way too close to physical violence. You don’t f*ck with people who are spending their 3rd hour in line!

When I get home I learn that the Federal Policy is doing “operação padrão” (“standard operation”) today. This means that they are no longer officially on strike, but they are still p***ed they express this by working exactly by the rules. Presumably, their rules tell them that everything must be done super-slowly. (Though, I must say that in comparison to Russia, their attitude was quite nice. Kind of like “I will do my best to help you with your problem after I take a couple of lunch breaks.”)

An update (May 9):

I ended up going back to the federal police two weeks later, and managed to get out in 15 minutes. There was almost literally nobody inside! I am guessing that they managed to scare people away during the week when they were on strike.