Theallenblend-o-matic

Germans

Since I am German I am allowed to post this:) Very funny! Christian, a lot of that stuff will be very familiar to you (please, turn the fan off honey!)
It was written by German expats...they wrote many more (even a book), but these are the "real thing". Enjoy!

Germans plan their illnesses
The Germans love planning and punctuality, and they tend to scoff at our play-it-by-ear methods as juvenile, a side effect of our cowboy mentality. Germans don’t value spotaneity, they value everything running as planned. If you are ever waiting for a train in Germany and notice that it is over one minute late, you will hear at least one German denouncing the Deutsche Bahn as unreliable, despite the fact that it manages a 20,000 mile network of rail road carrying five million passengers each day with stunning efficiency. The Germans love planning so much that they even plan out their illnesses.

If you work with Germans and try to contact one who is missing from work due to an illness, his boss will tell you that he is sick until next Thursday. That’s because Germans go back to work when their doctor schedules them to be well again.

Germans let their kids do stuff
March 1st, 2009 Walk through a park in Germany on a Friday evening and you are certain to see a group of young teenagers well on their way to becoming completely intoxicated, and you will also notice that none of the adults walking by give them a second glance. That’s because Germans let their kids do things that Americans would never dream of allowing.

Germans recently decided it is a bad idea to allow cigarette vending machines available to anyone 3 feet tall or over, but that doesn’t mean you won’t see a group of kids that can barely reach the counter in their local Rewe working together as a team of 4 to struggle to carry the case of beer and pooling their money together to pay the 10 Euros for it. Although German parents aren’t particularly worried about their kids’ safety, the German government is worried about protecting its future tax base. That is why German kids have to use car seats a few years past the age that their parents let them start drinking. “Luca, get back in your car seat, and I told you a thousand times to use the ashtray!”

Not only will kids get the opportunity to hear dirty words on the radio and see naughty body parts on regular television, but they are also reading detailed instruction on how to do things only married people should being doing in the Bravo magazine that they have been subscribing to since they turned 11. Forget chaperons at the school dance, German teenagers are hanging out preglowing in the parking lot across from the disco so they can save enough money for the bus ride home afterwards.

German kids are allowed to go places by themselves, even riding the subways of largest cities completely unaccompanied. You don’t have bright yellow school buses with flashing lights stopping all traffic on both sides of street, school children are left to fend for themselves when they leave the campus. Some are allowed to even ride a bicycle without knee pads and a helmet.

One dramatic place where you can see German parents letting their kids do whatever they want is sports. German parents don’t stand on the sidelines screaming at their kids to kick the ball harder and run faster at the soccer game, they just let them play however they feel like. It’s despicable.

Germans work 86% as much as Americans
November 23rd, 2008 Life in Germany is hard, so Germans don’t have the energy to work as much as Americans. Even German professionals punch the clock to track their time spent at work down to the minute. The concept of flex time is nearly universal in Germany as is the constant complaining by every German employee that they have so many overtime hours that they don’t know how to get rid of. It is such a burden to them knowing that they are needed by their employers yet owed more time off, because their 30 days of vacation and multitude of holidays a year just aren’t enough, when they work a little longer on the few days a year that they actually go to the office.

When the stress of trying to take care of their own leisure time needs and work place demands simultaneously gets to be too much, Germans go to a doctor to get prescribed a six week Kur, a sort of health spa retreat, where they can enjoy the benefit of having their health insurance pay for the all-inclusive resort, and their employer paying them their full salary for learning horseback riding and cooking. The best part for Germans is that these count as sick days and don’t take away any of their thirty days of vacation.

Germans are delicate and need lots of time to erholen, to sort of rejuvenate, and they need at least one vacation a year with 3 consecutive weeks to properly recoup. This is best done in a sunny place like Greece, Turkey, Spain, or Portugal. In America we tell each other to have fun on vacation, Germans command each other to erholen themselves well.

Germans don’t make very many babies, but the ones who do are well rewarded for leaving their employers in a precarious position. Whether they are male or female, Germans can take maternity or paternity leave for up to three years and their employers must hold a place for them, so they can waltz back into corporate life right where they left off. These poor workers can still complain though that they unfairly have to start back where they left off, having missed out on 3 years of raises and promotion opportunities.

Quick Tipp - Germans make fun of you when you try to say stuff
June 13th, 2008 English is easy to pronounce. German is not. We don’t put any dots on our letters, or make weird b shapes and call them a pair of s’s. Germans know their language is filled with sounds foreigners can’t make, so they try to get you to say certain words so that they can mock you. Such words include:

Eichhörnchen - This is the classic trap Germans set for us.

Oachkatzlschwoaf - This is the Bavarian cousin of the aforementioned.

Streichholzschächtelchen - This is the ultimate impossible German word to say.

But pretty much any word that starts with an “r”, such as rechts, is physically impossible for us to say. Avoid these words.

If you decide to learn to speak German despite the ample warnings given here previously, you will have to cope with Germans who will either make you say one of these words to mock you directly and openly, or repeat everything you say to them but in correct German, or worse at parties or on TV shows talk to you with a fake American accent.

For the amusement of the German readers, John presents his fake Bavarian accent in the attached audio clip: Fake Bavarian

Not yelled at is praise enough
June 10th, 2008 The Germans love to tell you when you do things wrong, and you if you aren’t prepared for it, it’ll start to get you down, because the Germans won’t tell you when you do things right. The Schwabs coined the phrase that not being yelled at is enough praise, but the idea applies nation wide. If you live in Germany, be prepared for strangers to point out all of your faults.

If you ride your bicycle around town and accidently leave your little headlamp on during the day time, 73% of Germans will yell at you for driving with your light on. Maybe it is because Germans are so concerned with the environment and that you are generating an extra 3 Watts of needless heat that are contributing further to global warming (and of course it’s even worse that you do this as an American). Or maybe its just because the Germans can’t resist telling you that you are doing something wrong no matter how trivial.

Americans think German service is worse than it is
May 16th, 2008 There is a major cultural difference between Americans and Germans, and that is in how we dine out. In America, we always need a distraction, we don’t just sit around and talk, there must be something else going on.

That’s why we love baseball, it gives us a backdrop to sit in the sun, drink a beer, and catch up. In baseball, every game has a minimum of 17 warm up periods, plus a “7-inning stretch”, so there is plenty of time to chat or insult the players. Americans complain that soccer is boring, but really the problem with soccer is that it doesn’t fit into our mold of a sport that gives us frequent breaks in the action for chances to talk.

Our collective national attention deficit disorder extends to dining out as well. We want to walk into the door, be greeted immediately, get shown to a table, get greeted by the waitress within 2 minutes, have drinks delivered within 5 minutes, and have the meal finished within 30 minutes. Within 3 minutes of our last bite, we want to have the check payed for so we can move on to the next distraction. Our number one complaint at restaurants is that the check took too long. Americans have always just been lookin for freedom, and we absolutely hate the feeling of being held hostage by a waitress not giving us the check.

Herein lies the source of all cultural misunderstandings at restaurants between our two proud nations.

Germans want to get the check only after they have asked for it, because they view it as pushy by the waitress to throw the check on the table, as if to say “get out of here, now”. In America, it is a given that we want to get out of there right now.

Germans usually want to sit and have a few more drinks and chat a while before going home, because dinner and socializing are enough for Europeans. If Americans want to have a few more drinks and chat, we have to go somewhere with either TV’s on all the walls, pool tables, or some kind of video game to keep us distracted.

So if you are dining out in Germany, here are the rules to not be completely annoyed by a lack of service.

1.Go look for a table yourself, no one is going to greet you and show you to a table.
2.If there are none available, move on to the next restaurant, because the people aren’t leaving anytime soon (if you are in Bavaria its ok to just join someone else’s table if there is space. You can just ignore them like other people sitting across from you on the subway, or throw in some small talk, if you want).
3.If you don’t know what you want, order Wiener Schnitzel, you will never go wrong. Put some mayonnaise on your fries, its actually really good to dip fatty potatoes into a fatty sauce.
4.When you want something, such as the check, its your job to grab the waitress’ attention.
Germans have the legitimate complaint about American wait staff, that they constantly pester you and interrupt your discussions to ask you 47 times if everybody’s doing ok over here.

Our complaints for Germany is that they don’t often make themselves available to ask for the check, and just assume that you don’t have any other plans for the night, so speed couldn’t possibly be an issue.

If your order wasn’t what you were expecting because of some kind of miscommunication or mix up, your waitress in Germany will always matter-of-factly explain to you that that is what you ordered, and that is what you are getting.

But the thing that is very strange is that the German waitress first ask you after you have finished your entire meal if it tasted good. That way its too late to do anything to fix it, which we expect American restaurants to do for us, if we aren’t satisfied. (One hint for the Germans, if you complain enough at a restaurant, you will get free stuff in America).

Last tip for Americans, if you want to avoid spending a lot of time dining out, because you want to do other things, ask a local kid where the best Döner Kebab in town is. It’s kind of a Germanized Turkish treat similar to a Gyro, that will be served up quick, is fairly healthy for fast food, and really beats going to the Embassy. Memorize this phrase to order: “Einmal Döner normalfleisch mit ohne Zwiebel scharf, bidde,” and enjoy the food that Germans miss the most when they are abroad.

And one last helpful tip for any Germans that want to take advantage of free refills in America: you won’t get any more as soon as you pay your bill. In America, that super friendly waitress will cease to acknowledge your existence the instant you have settled up.

When the sun shines in Germany
May 14th, 2008 The absolute best time in Germany is a summer day when the sun is shining, which doesn’t often happen. Actually, God himself even tried to convince all the atheists in the country of his existence by making the sun shine throughout the entire month Germany hosted the World Cup in 2006, a more impressive feat than parting the Red Sea.

You see, to really enjoy something, you need to endure its opposite. For every sunny day in Germany you have 2 days where the skies are a mix of grays and have this constant drizzle that makes you cold and miserable. And that makes the sunny days that much better. In Germany you never take sunshine for granted; you must cherish every single ray.

On sunny days you can enjoy the lush beautiful green landscapes, from amazing Alpine vistas to yellow rape seed fields sprinkled with giant windmills, working to save our planet through biodiesel and clean electricty. You will see the roads filled with motorcycles and the sidewalks full of families riding bikes or roller blades, all gleefully enjoying their good fortune. Even the guy who normally wouldn’t take the time to grunt at you in passing will offer up a friendly reminder of the beautiful day.

You, of course, will notice things Germans do differently when it is warm and sunny. First of all, Germans don’t own shorts, unless they are for playing soccer in. So when the sun comes out and a German decides to lay out in the park, they will first put on 7 layers of clothing until they reach their tanning destination, at which point they will take off the remaining 6.5 layers.

Our idea that you should run around in the summer time in flip flops, shorts, and a t-shirt is completely foreign to the Germans, they never leave home without long pants and a jacket. Perhaps it is a side effect of all Germans having circulation problems so bad that they have to call in sick from work on such days.

Mixed messages on the motorway
May 7th, 2008 Ah, the world-renown Autobahn. Driving at speeds over 150 mph right next to semis driving 50 mph is quite a rush, and should be on anyone’s to do list when visiting Germany. It’s just a shame the Dutch don’t learn to speed up or get out of the way.

But the lack of a speed limit doesn’t really fit to the German mentality for two reasons.

1.It is quite dangerous. Germans love insurance against unfortunate things from happening to them. Physics says going at an unlimited speed may turn out bad.
2.It is a waste of gas. As you go faster your wind-resistance gets much higher and you waste fuel. Germans are generally very ecologically minded, so you would think that a country that makes you pay a deposit for just about any container that could possibly be recycled and makes you sort your trash three ways would set speed limits on the Autobahn.
So what does Germany do instead? They spend money to put up signs to tell you there is no speed limit like this:

So you can now drive as fast as you want, but you may soon start noticing signs like this:

That’s the suggested speed. If you are feeling like a nice person, you will follow that suggestion for the safety of the rest of people on the road and to do your small part for the environment. But then the weirdest thing Germany does is put up advertising on giant billboards to tell you just how uncool you are if you drive fast.

The worst part of this whole thing aside from being a complete waste of money is having to constantly explain to American colleagues traveling in Germany that the sign is not about what they think it is about.

I guess Daimler, Porsche, VW, BMW, Bosch, and Conti are happy just the way things are.

Don’t learn German
May 12th, 2008
Living in Germany is great, and I would recommend it to anyone. Speaking German, on the other hand, is terrible and it should be avoided at all costs. In fact, Mark Twain warned us way back in 1880 in his essay The Awful German Language not to bother with this language. There are countless reasons not to learn German, so let’s discuss a few:

1.The German language is, in fact, impossible to learn unless you begin learning it as a baby. Starting to learn this language is impossible if you start later, because your brain will lack the capacity to learn so many senseless details, such as the different forms of the word “the”.
1.» You probably know in German there are three different genders der, das, and die. So for every single noun out there, you need to memorize a gender as well (the are some rules for determining gender, but for every rule there are just as many exceptions as examples that fit, so you still have to memorize every single one individually). But you also need to change the article, based on the case that you are using the noun in. Let’s see what this looks like in German:

German
Nominative der das die die (pl.)
Accusative den das die die
Dative dem dem der den
Genitive des des der der

Now let’s translate that table into English:

English
Nominative the the the the (pl.)
Accusative the the the the
Dative the the the the
Genitive the the the the

Do you really want to learn a language that has 16 ways to say the word “the”? And it doesn’t stop there, you need to learn 16 ways to say “a” (in English 2), and 32 ways to change adjective endings (in English we have 0). And you want to try to do this in real-time in your head while trying to carry one a conversation… forget about it.

2.» In English, when something is plural we just add “s” to the end. In German you add an “s”, an “e”, a couple of dots somewhere in the middle, an “er”, an “en”, or just do nothing at all and the word becomes plural. Also be careful what case you are talking in, because that changes the plural form again, should you use the dative case.
3.» For every verb you learn, you must learn to conjugate it for I, you, You, they, he, she, it, and ya’ll. You’ll also need to learn them in present tense, past tense, perfect past tense, and subjunctive. Oh, and having one subjunctive case isn’t good enough for Germans. Germans need two subjunctive cases, because they deem it necessary to designate hearsay grammatically.You will never learn all this, so don’t bother trying.
2.No matter how good your German gets, most Germans will speak English much better than you can speak German. Let them do the work in learning your language, since they have to do it anyway to talk with the rest of the world. The British have figured out you can live in Germany with no problems without speaking a word of German, so just follow their lead.
3.Use your lack of German speaking abilities to your advantage in the workforce. For every professional job in Germany, English is a required skill. So by default, any professional working in Germany who doesn’t speak English fluently either lied to get the job and/or is incompetent. Forcing these people to speak in English gives you an unfair edge in order to dominate negotiations. Try negotiating in German and you have the exact opposite situation… don’t set yourself up for a weaker position by learning enough German to get you into trouble.
4.It makes business meetings more entertaining, because when you show up to the meeting and say you can’t speak German, the meeting has to be conducted in English to accommodate you. This will slow down the pace of the meeting considerably, because you are forcing the majority of the people to speak a foreign language, but Germans love to discuss things so much, that they will take up all the allotted time for the meeting either way. You might as well do this to make it more fun, because it’s really entertaining to watch people who agree with each other fight each other. Since the Germans in the meeting will be so busy trying to figure out how to say what they want to say next in English, they won’t have any chance to pay attention to what the other person is saying, so a heated argument will always ensue, even when the participants completely agree with each other. Sit back, drink some excellent European coffee, eat some Keks and enjoy, cause you wouldn’t be going home soon anyway.
5.You will never learn how to say ö or ü.
6.Germans will change their spelling system as soon as you learn it. By the time you learn the difference between das and daß, daß doesn’t exist anymore, and in its place you have words like Schifffffahrt.
7.Tokio Hotel records English versions of their songs, so you have that angle covered as well.

Germans eat 1.7 times faster than Americans
April 30th, 2008 Germans are the kings of efficiency and this extends into the realm of eating lunch. If you work at a big company in Germany, you will almost certainly have a cafeteria to eat in which serves up great subsidized meals. Because Germans want to spend as little time as possible at work, they limit their lunch breaks to exactly 45 minutes. That means you have 45 minutes to walk from the office to the cafeteria, get served up a nice meal and a tiny drink with no ice (and no free refills), talk about the latest episode of the emigration reality show, a soccer match, or what would have happened if some battle in a war 95 years ago would have turned out differently. After that you need to return your dishes and take a 10 minute walk the long way back to the office.

When you subtract the walking times and time needed to buy your lunch, you actually only have about 10 minutes to eat your meal while discussing 1 reality show, 1 soccer match, and 1 alternative outcome to a historic event. You as an American cannot pull it off. Do not attempt to participate in the conversation, focus solely on eating as fast as you can. The cards are stacked against you in this for the following 2 reasons:

1.You likely haven’t mastered the super-efficient German style of eating, whereby you scoop everything onto your fork in your left hand with your knife that’s in your right hand. Maybe you are becoming adept at using the fork with your left hand and are gaining speed, but it won’t be enough.
2.You must constantly try to remember the gender of every noun you want to say, then figure out whether the prepositions you want to use require the accusative, dative, or genitive case. Then you have to match the gender with the case to figure out the needed definite article in a table in your head you learned in German class, and you are almost there. Now you just have to figure out the adjective ending based on the definite article and you have part of the sentence you want to say completed. Now figure out where the verbs go in the sentence, conjugate and you are ready to add your mustard to the conversation. Unfortunately by the time you have your witty sentence about the reality show constructed in your head, the topic has already moved on to the Bundesliga.
Not only did you not get to say a single word about the first topic, you wasted your first 3 minutes of valuable eating time. You are still working on your soup, while your German colleagues have already finished their Maultaschen and are getting ready to dig into dessert.

Once again its going to be one of those days where the only thing you said all lunch long was genau one time, and your colleagues are still going to have to wait for the slow American to finish lunch.

Why it always rains in Germany
April 28th, 2008 When you arrive in Germany, one thing you will notice first is that it seems to always be overcast and rainy. The reason for this is simple: When Germans don’t eat all of the food on their plate, the sun doesn’t shine the next day. It is quite a feat to get 80 million Germans to all eat their plates completely empty on the same day, let alone all of the tourists there, who don’t know the rules.

Now, when you go to a restaurant in Germany, be sure you finish up everything on your plate, not only because you’re not going to get a doggie-bag, but because if you don’t the waitress will come and yell at you for not finishing your meal. Even though you are still full from a big breakfast at the hotel of fresh baked Brötchen and cold cuts, or scrumptious butter-filled pretzels, you must eat every last bite of your meal, because otherwise your waitress is going to have to spend your tip at the tanning salon, since once again the sun won’t be shining tomorrow.

Perpetual handshaking and timely greetings.
April 18th, 2008 If you are going to work in Germany, get ready to shake the hand of every colleague you have every day. In America, we generally shake hands when first meeting someone, or if we haven’t seen each other in a very long time. Germans on the other hand want to shake hands one time per day.

Sometimes you will forget with which colleagues you have already shaken hands, and you may try to reshake and your colleague will begin to extend his or her hand until the moment of realization that that would be two shakes in one day, and one or both of you must jerk your hand away and exclaim “wir hatten schon!,” because shaking hands twice in one day is just as unacceptable as eating two warm meals in one day.

On occasion the German you greet may be unable to offer you his hand because he has them both full, has dirty hands, or is sick (you can tell because they will wear a scarf around their neck, without exception), at which point you will be offered a wrist or an elbow, which you are obliged to awkwardly shake.

If one arrives a little late and it would cause an interruption to make way through the room shaking with each individual, it will suffice to knock on a table. It is understood that you have in this way greeted everyone in the room. You will get bonus points as a German insider if you yell out, “Es gilt”, so that everyone knows they have been greeted.

On the subject of greetings, you must always check your watch before offering a greeting, because the standard greeting changes throughout out the day. Of course in the morning you say guten Morgen, but at about 11 a.m. Germans switch it over to mahlzeit or literally translated “meal time”. This can extend well into the afternoon until it becomes a more natural guten Tag.

Telling people it is meal time for like 3 hours at midday weird. It should be stopped.

Walking with ski poles is a hobby
April 17th, 2008 Germans came up with a new English term that doesn’t really exist to invent a goofy “sport”, Nordic Walking. Germans can’t just go for a stroll outside, they need everyone to know they are being athletic by walking in expensive Nordic Walking gear and carrying ski poles.

To quote a German website hawking nordic walking wares, “Nordic Walking is a new, completely revolutionary movement-concept.” It used to be that old people hiked around with a stick, but when you use two sticks, suddenly its a revolution in movement. Awesome.

Strange.

German signs tell you what the speed limit isn’t
April 17th, 2008 German roads have a certain speed limit based on what type of road they are. For example, everyone knows the beloved Autobahn has no speed limit, but also a smaller category of streets, the Autostraße, also has no speed limit in most cases. However, certain stretches of these roads do have speed limits because of any number of factors that would make driving at 250 km\h a tad dangerous.

But there are other types of streets that do have speed limits, and your key to successful driving in Germany is being able to determine what type street you are currently driving on, because in their twisted logic, Germans think it makes sense to tell you what the speed limit isn’t, instead of what it is. Let’s take the following sign as an example:

Simple, right? There is no speed limit because the restriction has been lifted. Not so easy, since all you know now is that the speed limit is not 60. How easy would it have been to put 100 kmh on the sign, or just stripes to let you know its unlimited? It doesn’t matter. Every German will argue until they are blue in the face that it makes perfect sense to tell you what the speed limit isn’t. This is probably because they paid $2,000 to get a driver’s license, so they must know better.

Dogs welcome, leave your kids at home
April 17th, 2008 Germans love their dogs, but they hate their kids. This is probably why the German population is dwindling.

When you dine at a restaurant, the first thing you will notice is that some mutt will be running around, and no one but you will notice it. However, if kids show up to a restaurant, every German will take note and be completely annoyed by their presence.

Germans must eat exactly one warm meal per day
April 17th, 2008 I am not sure what would happen to a German if they mistakenly eat two heated meals in one day, but I am sure it would be devastation, because all Germans make sure that they eat exactly one warm meal each day.

In fact, if you eat with your colleagues at work in the cafeteria, you can tell which ones are married, because they will grab a salad and a roll, then remind you that they have a wife at home who will cook warmes for them later. Even if the cafeteria is serving their favorite heated dish, the German must consider that his wife will cook later, and he cannot break the cardinal rule of never, ever, under any circumstances, eating two meals above room temperature in one calendar day.

Moving air causes death
April 17th, 2008 Although 300 million Americans have come to rely on air-conditioning as 20th Century necessity for comfort, 100% of Germans hate air conditioning with a passion. Germans would rather slave away at the office enduring 30°C temperatures and 90% humidity than be forced to cope with air the comes out of a machine at comfortable temperatures.

And it’s not just refrigerated air the Germans abhor so much, but rather any form of moving air at all. While Germans always love fresh air, the instant that air is set in motion it becomes deadly; a source of earth-shattering calamities.

Germans even have invented an illness, which is caused solely by the movement of air. The Zug, which couldn’t possibly be translated into English, because no English speaking person (despite our propensity for air conditioning) has ever been inflicted. But if a German tells another German, that they have caught a train?, then the sickly German receives instant sympathy for their suffering in this made-up affliction.

Also of note, temperature variations cause all kinds of bad things to happen to Germans. For example, if a German woman sits on cold concrete, she will lose the ability to become pregnant.

Brutal Honesty
April 17th, 2008 The first thing you need to know about surving amongst Germans is that they are brutally honest. If you are overweight at all, be prepared for 75% of your German friends to remind you of the fact that you are fat at least one time. In fact if you move to Germany, don’t bother buying a bathroom scale, some acquaintance will always let you know if you have gained a pound.

All around the world children say exactly what they are thinking. Eventually children of every other nationality on Earth learn that some things are best kept to yourself. The concept of a “little white lie” just doesn’t exist in German culture. Germans just don’t possess the talent to let you know how they feel in some sugar-coated way. Simply put, Germans are brutally honest, you have to learn to deal with it.