Notary public, Hong Kong

Today I got up extra early, because the cat had decided to give my groin a massage with her paws, and once I'd pushed her away, I found I had a meeting scheduled for 7:30 in the morning. Which was nice. Nicer was that the meeting was cancelled, so I had an extra half hour of standing around feeling like a spare part, when otherwise I'd have been being molested by a cat.

I had to take my marriage application form to get notarised, because as part of an epic adventure, we're getting married thousands of miles from where we live, and we can't just pop into the registry office to sort out paperwork a fortnight beforehand. We found a list of public notaries in Hong Kong, emailed as many as we could, and every last one of them told me it would be $2,000 to notarise it.

I wonder if this is a sign of a monopoly that's fixing prices, and if fifteen years ago I could have gone to the Walled City in Kowloon and got it done on the cheap by a part-time lawyer, part time dentist, full time triad. Oh well.

I walked from my office up and down a labyrinth of walkways over and under the road, eventually reaching the enormous silvery building where my notary was hiding. Up I went in a lift to a very expensive floor, where my notary was stored in a climate-controlled environment. At least if I was spending cash it was in palatial surroundings.

At the office, I was given a glass of water (for free) and sat in a room full of papers, and eventually my notary arrived, shook my hand, glanced at the form I had, then went off to photocopy it.

They should have invested more in soundproofing, because I spent five minutes listening to him complain that the paper was too large to be photocopied. Hardly the sound of a highly qualified lawyer at the top of his game.

Eventually he returned, and then had to go away again because he'd only copied the left side of the form, then came back again, got me confused with my fiancee... I'm not being supercritical here, I just think if you charge the hourly equivalent of $12,000 then you might give off the sensation of being fully competent.

But never mind. You're not paying $2,000 for a man to sign a bit of paper; you're paying $2,000 for a man who can be trusted to sign a bit of paper. Just so happens it's a man who can't photocopy that piece of paper without assistance.

Finally it was all done, and I handed over the cash, and then he looked at me, and I looked at him, and then I asked him where the receipt was that not ten minutes ago he'd said he'd give me, and there was another abbreviated eternity of faffing about before I had a bit of paper to say what I'd paid for.

Which I hadn't cared about up to that point, but if you're dealing with a notary who thinks he can get paid in cash and not give you any paper trail, you start to think the dentist-cum-lawyer-cum-bicycle-repairman in Mongkok who works for the minimum wage might have been just as good.

Am I being too anal retentive? Is this just the right way for the son of an accountant to behave?

Anyway, signed and sealed. Shortly to be delivered...