I’m not really trying to make this wacky German week — though I am curious to see how many people type the phrase “wacky German” into Google — but once again I’ve been flummoxed by situations that just shouldn’t be that difficult.

I’ve been working at Gruner + Jahr, a German publishing company, for more than two months now. Each morning as I come in, guards at the door check my (as well as everybody else’s) ID. Now, not to perpetuate stereotypes, but the guards are, eh, stereotypical Germans: Same people, every day, I say hi every morning — and when I forgot my ID last week, I still had to call somebody from upstairs to come and fetch me. I figured they were just really bad with faces, but found out that, nope, it’s just the rules; sure, they’ve seen me come in before, but maybe somebody was just impersonating me this time. You can never be too sure …

Today’s bizarreness wasn’t my fault, though. See, I don’t have a standard ID card, which would have my picture and stuff on it: Since I’m just a contract employee, only here for a few months, I have a card that gets me into the cafeteria (another high security area) and, supposedly, the front door. Whatever its actual purpose, the card I have has gotten me entrance for something like 50 consecutive days.

Today, though, the woman at the door decided to hassle me about it. (I’ve been sitting here for something like 10 minutes wondering if it would be in bad taste to use the phrase “ID Nazi.” I figure it would be, so I’ll go with “woman at the door” instead.) So, once again, I’m forced into a pidgin German/English conversation in which I really have little idea about what’s going on. In the end, they let me in, but told me to get a note from my boss.

You know, I wonder if I have any old high school hall passes stashed somewhere …