Shelves, Tax re-allocation, Water heaters

I had to go to the tax office today, but I got there at 12.02, and it closes at 12.00 on a Friday. It had taken me quite a while to work out how to fill out the form I wanted to submit, and I asked around at the technical university. This is the latest part of a lengthy process to do with the duty I have to pay on the flat we bought in March. My other half and I are joint owners, so we each have to pay a fairly hefty sum, the "illeték" - something like stamp duty. The amount of this is worked out by a typically complicated process, whereby the first 2 million forints is tax free, then up to 4 million is taxed at  2%, then the rest at 4% (or something like that.) So actually if the flat had only one owner he (I?) would pay more duty, if my maths are not mistaken. Anyway, we decided to try to ask the tax authorities - APEH - if we could pay this in installments, as they give you a fairly tight deadline to pay the lump sum, after which you have to pay a late payment penalty, which increases with every passing day. Applying for this involved a fair amoutn of hassle, filling in forms, writing a begging letter, working out how poor we could make ourselves out to be and proving it with supporting documents.
After sending all said bumpf we then received no reply for about two months, and were on the verge of phoning APEH (who would have said that they never received anything, ina typical knee jerk reaction) when they actually granted our wish. My letter said that they would not allow me to pay the full amount in installments, as they had found the overpaid taxes I was due after giving up being an "entrepreneur" a couple of years ago. These, they said, had to be transferred over to pay for part of the duty on the flat. This involved filling in a form, which I could only do after researcing the various tax codes of the 5 or 6 separate taxes and health and pensions contributions involved. Hungarian pay slips are long, complicated documents, as they list all these various taxes, contributions and deductions. Why they can't just have income tax and national insurance I don't know, but that is HOW THINGS ARE here, so I doubt anything will be changed, even if they draw up a new constitution as they will apparently be doing next spring.

Well, that was all rather dull, but I think it conveys the amount of time and energy that is wasted by Hungarian bureaucracy. The drones of this bureaucracy only work in the afternoons twice a week, so not only does everyone have to do most of their work for them, by doing lots of sums and finding out the codes they should know and use internally, but anyone who actually has a job has to take time off work to go and take a ticket wait in their offices for their turn to invariably told that a vital document is missing, and that they will have to come back another day.

Not that I really have a full time 9-5 job, but if I did it would be even more annoying. So it is a bit rich of me to call the bureaucrats lazy gets, but I will anyway, as many of them are rude, and seem to take delight in denying satisfaction.

In the afternoon I went to Praktiker, a DIY superstore and bought two shelves I had been procrastinatiing over for a week. I then went home and put them up in the kitchen, and they look rather good, neatly dividing the lower, rendered half of one wall with the upper, plastered half. They are "floating shelves", which is a translation from the Hungarian on my part, but I have just goolged it and that is indeed the English term too. No brackets. They look rather neat. Hope they don't fall off the wall.