Every now and then I observe that we - or people we know - are deprived of rights they are supposed to have due to problems with the bureaucrazy (misspelling intended). It may be working in slow or stupid ways, or sometimes one just happen to meet a rotten apple in the bureaucratic system (or possibly a corrupt employee wanting some kind of extra payment - but such kind of corruption is rare in Norway, so the "bad apples" are most likely not corrupt, just stupid, incompetent or malicious).
Some few examples:
Some years ago I sold bitcoins to some professional bodyguard, he needed it to buy a fake Norwegian passport for a Norwegian child. The child had been abducted and was somewhere abroad, the plan was to reabduct her and bring her back home, but to bring her back to Norway they would need a passport ... and a legitimate passport can't be issued without her physical presence in a Norwegian diplomatic station, together with at least one parent and a power of attorney from the other parent - and it was somehow impossible to perform. I was shaking my head in disbelief and didn't really want to sell bitcoins for such a purpose - but the man insisted that he had gone through all channels and had confirmed with the authorities that this was the only way to get this child back to Norway.
When we got married in Norway in 1998, my wife got an unconditional right for a residence and work permit in Norway (the rules have changed a bit now). However, she needed to apply to get the documents - and they needed half a year to process the application. To get the documents (a sticker in the passport) she had to be physically present in Norway, but she also couldn't enter the country without those documents. For all practical purposes she was stuck, couldn't leave the country, had a passport with an expired visa and no documentation that she was a legal alien. She couldn't apply for a job without the documents. Also, the permit was valid for a limited time span, and then she had to apply again and be stuck for yet another half year in Norway with an expired residence permit in her passport and without being able to apply for jobs (no, it was not possible to file the application half a year before the permit expired).
All Schengen members have the right to take employment in Norway. A Polish friend of mine got a job offer in Norway, found a place to rent and moved over to Oslo. To get a salary he needs a bank account (very few employers would be willing to pay the salary in cash - and by now the authorities even wants to explicitly forbid companies from paying salaries by cash). To get a bank account in Norway, he needs a personal identification number from the authorities. To get that he needed to physically meet up in an office. Due to the corona situation this office did have some capacity problems for such meetings - the next available slot was half a year in the future! (He owes me half a year of houserent by now).
That personal ID number have given us problems, too. Our children are born in Russia, but since they have a Norwegian father they are entitled to Norwegian citizenship, and as Norwegian citizens they have the right to travel home. When our first son was born, the Russian bureaucrazy was terrible, but they were very friendly in the Norwegian consulate and we got an emergency passport without problems. When our last was born, it was the complete opposite, we had problems not only with the passport, but also with documentation required for getting the name correct. The consulate could not issue a passport (and hence was denying the newborn - and his family - the right to go home) before we had this ID number. Newborns in hospitals in Norway get this assigned automatically the same day as they are born, Norwegians born abroad needs to apply for a number. I guess we should consider ourself lucky that it didn't take half a year.
Applying for a passport in Oslo
The capacity for the police to handle passport applications in the Oslo area has been a bit too low for years - and it has grown to the worse now with the pandemic.
Admittedly, the need for passports have also been a bit reduced due to travel restrictions. Anyway, people have started preparing for the summer, they are by now introducing a new national ID card (also issued by the police) and even a short trip to Sweden nowadays cannot be done without the police registering the passport. Emergency passports can still be issued through the "old" way, going to the police station and wait in a line - for a regular passport one has to book an appointment through a web interface, it has it's positives and drawbacks. At one hand one doesn't have to spend all the day sitting at the police station. At the other hand, due to the capacity crisis, one has to spend quite some effort on a daily basis, hoping to find a slot for an appointment at a police station not too far away from home. Passport applications also usually involves taking time off from work (for those of us having a day time job) and taking the child out from school.
Passports for children have a validity of two, three or five years depent on their age, that means that with four kids we relatively frequently need to apply for a renewed Norwegian passport. (The Russian passports are valid for ten years, which is practical for us, but at the other hand it's impossible to identify the ten year old child by looking at a photo of a baby. We were supposed to stay together in Norway for the easter vacation, but had totally forgotten that one of our children had just turned ten. Oups. His passport had gone out of date two days prior to our trip to Norway, so he had to stay with the grannies in Russia during that vacation).
Todays attempt on applying for a new passport
My 17-years old has gone out of date in april, so it needs to be renewed. I did find a lot of available slots for applying for a passport at the police station at my former home town of Tromsø, so I was considering to combine the passport application with a trip visiting his grandma. But then out of nowhere there appeared free slots in the early May at Drammen police station, that's not too far to go by train, so I grabbed the chance and reserved a slot.
oups
In Norway both parents needs to explicitly approve that the child gets a passport (and then the child can cross country borders without any extra documentation), so while my wife was in Norway over the easter holidays she wrote a power of attorney and left me with her Norwegian driving license. So with those documents, my passport, his old passport, me and him, that should suffice for applying for a new passport - we thought. So we took a day off from school and work and took a train to Drammen and ensured to meet up exactly at time - just to learn that the rules have changed. Since they have started rolling out those national ID cards, they no longer consider the driving license as a valid ID, they required either her passport or a stamped and approved hard paper copy of her passport - so it was a total failure, we just had to return. We're back to square one, we need to consider how to fix this document mess and do some daily browsing searching for an available appointment at the police. After all, everything is just going into a computer system - it should have been trivial for my wife to visit the nearest Norwegian consulate and get them to register that she consents in our son having a passport, but alas ... that's not the way it works, she will need to pay for getting them to put their stamp on a copy of her passport, and then she will need to physically ship said paper to me somehow - or come physically to Norway. It's so backward.
I was so frustrated and angry and felt that I needed to vent out some steam somewhere ... but just writing this made me calm down. The situation could be so much worse. I've heard of conflicts between divorced parents ending up in the child not getting a passport. We could have had hard plans on leaving the country the next day. I feel confident we will manage to solve this problem one way or another before the summer ... but still, that's not a given. The situation is a bit dire, he can't even pick up packages without a valid ID, we do hope we can get him with us on summer vacations, and it would be nice if he could visit his Russian grandparents before he turns 18 (when he's 18, a short visit to the grannies can easily involve two years of army service before he's allowed to return).
Image credits
Bureaucracy counter was found at Wikipedia and may be copyrighted.