Last night Nina and I were talking about bureaucracy and which of the countries we have visited display the worst bureaucracy. This conversation was prompted by a conversation Nina had with her sister about the level of effort and paper work associated with moving their family back from Germany to Australia.

Little did we know that today we would have an iconic experience of bureaucracy.

At 9:00am we were at the Chevy dealer to pickup the Tiger. They had not been able to fix the oil leak as parts for the Tiger's transmission are not available in Chile. They suggested that I simply check the oil level every day and top-up as necessary. To this end I went to their spare parts department to get some Dextron VI transmission oil.

• First I talked to a guy with a computer who looks up the product and makes an invoice for 1 liter of the stuff.

• He hands the invoice to a lady who re-enters the the details into her own computer and prints a new invoice in triplicate.

• We pay that lady for the oil and then she stamps each of the copies of the invoice.

• Then she hands the invoice to a guy who goes into the warehouse and gets the oil.

• He hands it to us and then stamps the invoice twice.

Now the transaction is done; but it took 3 people 20 minutes to do it.

I forgot to mention the hand - the big sculpture of a hand in the desert.