This is the back of my college diploma

The front side is just as wrinkled, creased, and crinkled.

As long as we're discussing Poland's less fine points, please allow me a cathardic howl over what recently befell this poor, innocent document, which understandably has a great amount of symbolic value for me.

As you may or may not know, arranging to live and work in Poland is a long, hard, nervewracking slog. To get a residence permit you need a work permit, but to get a work permit you need a residence permit. Each requires a significant sum of cash and hours of inconvenient line-waiting in drab offices packed with people crowding onto too-small benches. They also require piles of documents, pictures, stamps, signatures, notices, statements, permissions and so forth. What is required varies significantly from year to year, but there is always more, and whatever it is, it's harder to get.

As of November 1, 2005 one of these additional requirements came into effect. According to the regulation, what had previously been enough to satisfy the Ministry of Immigrant Affairs that you were educated - a signed, notarized translation of your diploma - was no longer enough. Now, it is required that each foreigner present his actual document - along with the signed, notarized translation - and a transcript from the school. These documents are then transferred to the Ministry of Education (which has nowhere near the capacity to handle such a job), where they will be evaluated and "adjusted" to the equivalent Polish degrees. Thus, a "Master's" degree in the States would most likely be adjusted to "Magister" in Poland.

My application for the renewal of my residence permit was due on November 4 - I got roped into this rule by three days.

So. Mom has to send the diploma from home, right?

No problem. Mom is a very dependable woman. She got the document in the mail virtually the next day (so as not to risk losing any more time), and even sent it priority with "Do not bend" stamped all over the bloody thing.

This is what I found in my mailbox last Monday:



There are shoe prints on the other side of the envelope you see above.

Of course, it wasn't laid out all flat like that - my mailbox is half that size. Instead it was folded - and I don't mean "gently rolled" folded, I mean creased and bent flat right down the middle. (It really is, though it's difficult to see in the first picture.)

This vandalism did not happen in the US, or in transit. It happened in that Polish mailman's hands. He could have brought this large envelope up to our door (we're on the fourth floor - there's an elevator) and at least attempted to deliver it in person. If he had, he would have found my girlfriend waiting there to receive it. She had a day off and was in the apartment when the mail was deliviered.

Instead, he pretended that he didn't understand "Do Not Bend" stamped five times on the envelope ("Do Not Bend" is global mail speak), and that whatever this was in this special priority envelope was surely not important enough to be kept flat that he must trudge all the way over to the elevator a meter away, travel up to the fourth floor, and knock on the door.

And hence, last Monday, I found my creased and crinkled diploma - a document I had studied four years to attain, a document which probably represents my life's greatest achievement so far (*sigh*), a document which most people have framed and hung on their office walls - smashed into my mailbox like a candy wrapper into an overfull garbage pail.

I will never be able to replace it, really. I could ask my college to send me another, but it certainly wouldn't be the same - the man who was President of my college and signed my diploma has moved onto another school. I don't know what the dating policy would be either. And to be honest, I'm not sure my college would even allow me to replace it.

I know. It's just a piece of paper. But damn it, that piece of paper represents my life in a way, and they trampled on it, crushed it and ruined it.

And all I was trying to do was follow the rules.