Bürgeramt Terminvereinbarung (Berlin local bureaucracy) – no appointments needed today!

First a public service announcement: If you're waiting for months to get an appointment with Berlin, you can go today with no appointment! 

That would just be a social media post, not a blogpost, except this whole situation is very weird. No one seems to want you to know, they want to see the system fail?

1. First of all, Brexit. I should still be an EU citizen. I was one, because I took an EU member state's passport, but then that state held an advisory referendum. Despite enormous irregularities that I've read would have invalidated a binding referendum, and a fairly close vote that really couldn't justify the scale of expense even to the UK let alone to the rest of the world, a Conservative government chose to leave the EU anyway. 
2. Nevertheless, I entered Germany as an EU citizen and as such was allowed to work, even though my citizenship ended the same day my new job started. However, for a while I couldn't leave and come back in and still be allowed to work. Fortunately, Germany created a special Aufenshaltstitel for people in this situation, which lasts 10 years. As some of the last EU citizens to need one (having just come in under the wire) we were two of the last people to finally get our appointment and card in May 2021. Unfortunately, the card is tied to my UK passport, which has expired, so I need a new card tied to my new passport.
3. Getting an appointment takes forever. At first we couldn't even figure out how to sign up for one, but then we found out that if you wake up early and click, you can get one on the newly-allowed date about 3 months in the future. Obviously this is difficult for someone whose job results in meetings and trips on very short notice. And indeed, I had to miss the opening reception and opening talks of a NATO meeting about reconciling EU and US AI policy because of the appointment I scheduled as soon as I got my new passport.
4. I turned up to my appointment last Wednesday 15 minutes early, and was reading through the German email about it, and realised that I had the wrong kind of photo with me. Since 1 May, they required biomarker identified photos, stored somewhere digitally with a QR code. The guards told me the nearest place to get one. That plus 6 normal passport photos cost me less than €6 – a lot less than two ordinary passport photos cost in the US near the New York Chinese Embassy, I might add. Unfortunately, it also cost me about 25 minutes, and it turned out that the Bürgeramt closed only 17 minutes after my 14:13 appointment. 
5. I got there with 5 minutes to spare. But the door to the building was locked. A guard let me in but said I couldn't go into the main building and to the Bürgeramt office. I told her the guards had been helping me and there were lots of people waiting for appointments so I was sure mine was still on the board, but she refused to let me in. After much discussion, she told me to come back first thing the next available morning. Because of a holiday and a system failure, I actually did manage to do that on Monday. 
6. On Monday I got there at 8am and there were 7 people in front of me. I had been surprised getting in line with no appointment would ever work in Germany, but they told me that in fact every morning a few people get in without appointments. I asked how it could work if you don't have an appointment, and they said that there was a system set up to handle you at that time. Those 7 people got in, but I did not.
7. Today I went 15 minutes before the opening, and there was no one waiting in front of me, in fact the door was open. And there was a film crew outside. I went in. I had to explain at length what had happened. The woman in the Bürgeramt was extremely angry about my story. She said you can't just come back with no appointment, even if you left before your appointment and came back only a few minutes late, you should have booked another appointment. In fact, I had tried to book another appointment, but none were free at all until early July, and then only in places I'd never heard of, and on a day I had to do another German thing I'd booked months in advance.
8. Once I got a new appointment and went into the waiting room, there was only one other number on the screen – and the room crowded the previous Wednesday afternoon was empty. Then a television person walked up and asked if she could speak to me. She asked if I knew it was a special day at the Bürgeramt. I did not. My number was called and I promised to talk on camera after I came out. 
9. I was worried that this would be some weird political thing, so I asked the woman who was helping me with the Aufenshaltstitel what was special about today, and she told me that today is an experimental day where you don't need appointments. What? Then why was I told how bad I was to be asking for an appointment, and that it was never normally possible to get a new appointment, which was anyway completely against what the other people in line had told me. And why was there nothing online – I guess because there were literally no appointments because you didn't need one, but you would have thought they could have told you somehow that there were days that were appointment-free. 
10. In the time I've been writing this post, appointments have come free on other days than early July. right now several early July days have appointments. I'm guessing people are freeing up and then swooping in on appointments today, but there ought to be a lot more. https://service.berlin.de/terminvereinbarung/termin/day/
11. Apparently I can pick up my new Aufenshaltstitel in 8 weeks. For my new UK passport, I had to book no more than 3 weeks in advance, and it was very easy to find a slot 3 weeks in advance, and the passport was printed and physically posted to me (to a UK address) arriving in two days, though it took a further four to also receive my "supporting documents" (my old AND my US passports, which the webpage had said I didn't need to leave if I made colour photocopies of them, but the guy at the desk forced me to leave them...) which of course made me panic since I needed to get back to the EU... Then I thought waiting 7 days for a passport was nuts (it didn't used to be necessary, but the UK now has decided people with two passports need special treatment.) But Germany is way less efficient than the UK...

Berlin generally makes all kinds of sense.