Innocently pivoting my way through population statistics obtained from the German Federal Office of Statistics’s web-site – I made an eye-opening discovery – just as shocking as it was revealing of how it is going downhill with morals in this society!

In 2009 a 9 year old german boy got married and a 9 year old german girl got divorced!

Well, then again this is a bit surprising as we have laws in Germany which demand that you have to be at least 16 years old to get married. So I wrote to the customer service of GENESIS and I got just two days later a surprisingly friendly and competent answer which acknowledged that something just went wrong here with the data – Excel files attached with the correct data and a promise that the online data is going to be updated soon. (If it just could be always like this!)

Now, me working with large amounts of data on a daily basis, I am the last person in the world to blame somebody (not even legal personalities) for an occasional mistake in this realm – and you know what we Germans are famous for.

So what’s the moral of the story?

Expect that mistakes are done – by others and by yourself.