[Serious] Have you personally experienced corruption in your country?

I grew up in Romania. Corruption was everywere. A few examples I ran into:

  1. I was about 14 and really into cycling. One evening I was riding quietly with my best friend when a street cop steps up in front of me and yells "stop, you piece of shit!". We stop and he's looking to book us for something. He decides to pick on the fact that our bicycles didn't have headlights (the street was very well lit, so we didn't need any). He asks for our name and address and we're stupid enough to give him our real info (we had never dealt with cops before, so we felt pretty intimidated). He then tells us that the fine is X (huge amount, about a week's pay), but because we seem like good boys he's willing to forgive us if we "buy him a beer". Then he specified the amount, which was enough for like 50 beers, but less than the fine. We obviously didn't have that kind of money on us, so he says he'd meet us the next day, same place, same time. If we didn't show up with the cash, he'd mail the fines to our homes. Luckily the dad of another friend of mine was a cop in the same small town too, so we went to him that evening and asked for advice. He talked to his colleague the next morning and got him off our back.

  2. When I was 20 I apllied for my driver's license and the guy that supervised my road test hinted that I would not pass unless I gave him something. I pretended I didn't understand his innuendos as I was pretty confident in my skills. However, the dude was extremely anal and picked on every tiny mistake I made. I flunked the road test. I tried again a month later and had another supervisor that didn't ask for money and was cool. I passed without a problem.

  3. At the end of highschool, there was a series of very important exams (similar to the SAT, but 5 or 6 separate 3-hour exams over a few days). The curriculum was huge and included core stuff such as language and math, but also fluff like history, geography, etc. The history study books were huge, about 500 pages total. Nobody could reasonably memorize all that crap, so we collectively bribed the proctors of our history exam to let us bring text books and cheat sheets into the room and cheat the hell out of that exam.

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