Germany is a nice place, but sometimes the bureaucracy is a bit much.
Especially when you try to write them a nice mail that you can't come to their "mandatory" appointment.
Because you're sick, like every damn time during the autumn holidays.
An email to an address where the hostname doesn't even exist. WTF?

Also don't you think that address is a bit too long? Chances for typos are pretty high when you do that, you know?

When I last had to deal with the jobcenter, I seriously considered a career in organized crime.
Not only did I wait for 3 hours before someone who barely understood German (or any other language for that matter), I also had to explain that, while I am very flexible, a Rails Software engineer can not (or at least probably should not) operate a locomotive or build tracks for one.
Needless to say they weren't a big help finding a job.

@ilPinguino "Youre a rails developer so you can develop rails for trains right?" "No actually its ruby--" "tzz tzz excuses.. 10 jobs as a rails engineer here you go!"

Last time I had to deal with the jobcenter, the following happened:

Me: Specialized in C/C++ on Linux
JC: Here are three Software Development positions. Application is mandatory.

Two were C# .Net, one was a PHP job. All three junior level.

Thank the Maker, I already had my current job before the old ended.

If you are in unemployment stage 1 (ALG1), application for every job is NOT mandatory, and neither is moving to another city.

But yeah, they suck. The one time where I was looking for a job, they couldn't even enter "embedded systems" into their database because then the GUI crashed. WTF?!

At least, they didn't bother me. I just found me a job without their "help", and that was only time where no bureaucracy was necessary. I could just call them via phone and tell them to stop paying money to me.

@Fast-Nop You are right, application wasn't mandatory. Thank you for the correction. Confused that with a not-so-funny episode of my life in 2006.