>>>I'm guessing things in English were tipping faster than you could keep up ;)
>>
>>You know how the Sisyphus story ends? He finally gets the stone to the summit, and there the bureaucrats say "sorry, wrong stone".
>
>That sounds like Eastern European bureaucratic zeitgeist in a nutshell :)

The author is someone from here, perhaps 19970s or 80s. Aphorism is a venerated tradition in these parts.

But then it also neatly describes my green card process and how I gave up.