The advertisement was on a website for apartment advertisements, “Stachus, 4 rooms, 120 m2, WM 1.250, garage 6 × 6, balcony 10 × 10”. This ad gave me migraine-like conditions. I was tempted to believe that this was more of a job advertisement for a statistician than a property advertisement.
I was such a bad math student at school. If I added numbers together, the result might just as well have been rolled. My eye for numbers became a little sharper when the subject of money became relevant to me and my classmates. In Bavaria I was finally motivated to take a path that I had always avoided. The way of calculating.
The agony begins with calculating time and continues with measuring square feet and declaring taxes. At first I felt like an illiterate professor of literature in Munich. Nobody in Munich needs a pocket calculator; people pay for themselves through their city at the speed of light. Kilometers, inches, centimeters. If I had just done the math classes a little more courageously.
The more time adds up in the new home, the more calculable it becomes. At some point you start thinking about how inflation will affect the price of beer at the next Oktoberfest. Where the bills and taxes consume a considerable part of the monthly income. The instrument of the tax refund procedure was a splendid discovery for me, despite various arithmetic tasks. Some employees even dare to compare their pay slips with those of their colleagues. Together they do the math so that the employer doesn’t rip them off.
The Munich is an accounting. It looks like everyone has a built-in calculator and thermometer in their heads. When winter comes you can hear them talking shop about the ski season with snow depths and temperature information. For some, that’s not enough, so hang a second thermometer in front of the window. Or they download weather apps to their cell phones. As if this could prevent the weather from misbehaving. When it comes to that, you have to reckon with almost everything in Bavaria.
Translation from English: Korbinian Eisenberger