If there's one thing I'd like to see, it's the permit office sending you a complete set of instructions about what they want when it's time to renew your permit. The morons here send you the form saying oh we need A and B and this form and then you mail it in and they mail it back saying 'We're sorry your application is incomplete because you did not send us C, D, and E'
Well, bugger me you idiots, if you had mentioned them I'd have sent them!
I suppose the Swiss would blame me for doing something that should be 'obvious if you weren't a foreigner' but this seems a lot like either (a) a bureaucracy using old forms with old instructions rather than print new ones and/or (b) creating work for both the people in the permit office (which otherwise wouldn't be needed) AND the post office! Yay. Time to go make pizza....

Chill out, i spent 1 year doing this with them.....this is how Swiss operate, pure mayhem in everything they do

On the giving end or the receiving end?

Except the bills, they arrive quickly with much more than you anticipate, they never fail to show.

You can always write (email) to the migrationsamt. They take a few days to respond, but I got a very clear answer about what I had to do. Same from STVA (form attached and even instructions how to fill the form!).

Now the efficiency of the gemeindehaus people is another topic altogether

[QUOTE=or (b) creating work for both the people in the permit office (which otherwise wouldn't be needed) [/QUOTE]

I'd go with that version...
Had to go to the Gemeindehaus a few years ago, where a friend of mine worked. As I passed his office, he was sitting in front of a turned off computer and one piece of paper he read over and over again. I watched him for a few minutes before I lost my nerves... nearly fell asleep watching him "work"...

But you wrote to a place in the "Suisse Alèmanique" ! The others on this thread here wrote to the "République de Genève" ! To quote Prof. Jean Ziegler : "La Suisse n'èxiste pas"

Admit it, you were almost dying of envy

"République de Genève" is an independent city in the center of Alps mountains that doesn't belong to any country / nation, doesn't really follow any rules and totally occupied by aliens from god knows where who call themselves "Genevoise"

no actualy not. I asked him if he was having fun and he said: not really, he was quite bored.

so maybe it's realy just creating work for themselves.
and maybe we should be thankful to be living in a country that can afford to pay people for doing nothing...

That's pretty common here, i once had a friend who spent 98% of his time at work doing nothing that he was complaining about it and he was getting paid full salary and getting bonuses

yea I hear that a lot. but somehow I always miss those job interviews and end up doing real work!

You mean you've never come across a paper that you had to read several times to get a grasp of? Lucky you.

During my entire citizenship process, that's exactly what they did during the entire process. Every time we had everything they told us we needed, they came back with new requirements. F••king drove me up the wall. I should have told them that they'd need to reserve a room for me at Burghölzli for when the process was done…

no... i'm a clever little cookie, you know...

The funny thing I found when I had to renew my work permit was it was more expensive to do it if I went to the Office de la Population than if i did it by mail.

Funny it may be, but by going there you
- would use the time of people there
- would interrupt their healthy office sleep
- would use their carpets
- would use their doors
- would increase the traffic in the area
> any questions ?

AND, when my mother, admittedly ages ago, went to Geneva for half a year, a local "insider" told her that in GVA, the abbreviation SVP has a different meaning, which is Si Vous Pouvez as otherwise the person in question is absent

I quit my last job (not my present one) in Zurich because of the workload - I didn't have anything to do and was bored stupid everyday. All the Swiss co-workers complained how busy they were and all the 'guest workers' were having a holiday in comparison with jobs in other countries, and we had the bulk of the workload.

My boss asked for my opinion on hiring some extra workers and another English guy and I said one person would be fine, so they hired an extra five!! That was when I gave up and left....

If there is one thing the swiss like it is an endless amount of paperwork. Simply tasks require loads of filling out and signatures. Not only foreigners get confused. I remember when I had to fill out my papers when I turned 18 it felt like they were asking me the same thing over and over again really annoying. Just got to put up with it or the swiss will flip shits

Are they still recruiting, this sounds exactly like a perfect match to qualifications