Chinese bureaucracy

Have you ever traveled around the world having to fill out those different forms at the hotel about nationality, length of stay etc? I had always thought that was just to keep track of who was in the hotel in case of some emergency. As I am not in a hotel in Beijing, but living in a penthouse apartment as a guest, I had to go to the police station and register my presence within 24 hours of arriving. This I figured out 2 weeks after I arrived...
Went to the apartment management, who sent me to their office. They took a few copies of my passport and sent me off to the police station around the corner. When I had to go to the consulate to get the visa, I read somewhere that people going to China would have to learn to stand in line anyways, so should not complain about a little bit of waiting time. Well, I got to try that one myself today.
Before going I was reading about their processing time had decreased from 10min to only 1min, so this would make less of an excuse for people not stopping by for registration. 10 minutes I thought, I would not have a problem waiting 10 minutes, why was that such a big deal? When I came to the police station, the time was 11:55 and it looked a little empty. There were around 10 counters with people sitting at some of them ready to "serve" the people. There was a big number on top of each counter so I was looking for a ticket machine so I could get my stuff done. There was no such machine and there was maybe 5 people sitting ready at their computers, but none of them as much as turned their heads with me standing just in front of them. They just kept looking at their computer screen at what ever it was showing.
I got eye contact with one guy standing a little in the background trying to look busy. I showed him my passport and paper work and asked where I could get this done. He looked at his watch and then me, he then gave me the sign of two. Two minutes, I thought, that's going to be really fast today, almost nobody else in there. I sat down and waited and then the guy finished his eating of whatever it was he was stuffing his face with. Every counter had a little scrolling display over it, and turned out that every counter was doing something different, and the counter number 2 was for temporary address registration. Hmm, could it be that he had been just giving me the sign of 2 as in counter number 2? Now I thought and got up, as he sat down at a counter, but I was surprised when he made himself very comfortable with shoes off and the back of the chair as far back as possible. I got his attention and he again showed me 2 and then he closed his eyes - to sleep! I sat back down and waited. More people came in, were totally ignored and left again. Now and then some new person apparently working there would come and sit down behind the computer and someone else would then leave. I figured so much that I had hit them on their lunch break, and they seem to take this very seriously! Ok, lunch would be half an hour, at the most an hour, it was already 12:20.
At 1:55 the office was suddenly flooded with people, and the line in front of counter 3 was suddenly 20 people long. No problem as I was heading for line 2 I was guessing so I got up and stood in line too. Turned out that the line 3 was for Chinese, and the line 3 was for foreigners... Now I was 20 in line or so. Crap. At around 3pm I got out of there with my temporary address registration card. Long live bureau-crazy