Life-Admin

Life administration is the necessary evil one must contend with in order to have more fun. Every so often I realise that to make my life easier I must go through that big pile of paper that has the invisible label "I'll deal with that later". Later has finally come.

Unfortunately, life-admin always takes longer than I expect. It has an intense snowballing effect. I usually start easy and work my way up to the difficult stuff. It turns out it's all difficult. Yesterday's easy task was trying to register my bank account with the tax office so they can pay me some monies. However, I ended up being frustrated and hungry (because of course I thought it would only take five minutes before breakfast and now it's lunchtime the next day), I'm still unregistered and the rest of the "I'll deal with that later" pile is staring accusingly at me with its "Ha! You thought this was going to be easy? I show you easy!" face on. It won yesterday, but not today. Today I'm going to wipe the floor with its smug 10 page online application which since it has your social security number it already knows all this stuff but just wants to make you fill it out anyway form!

Life-admin in a foreign country takes 10 times as long as in your native land. Official government type web pages usually only have the general information pages in English. For all other pages, you're on your own. After two years in Sweden I can mostly deal with the Swedish or I just ring the help desk and ask really stupid questions. Sometimes a word can be the success or failure of a life-admin session.You know what the word means, you've looked it up in the dictionary but that doesn't tell you what it actually MEANS in this context or how to do whatever it is you have to do in relation to the word. Or perhaps that word is connected to another word, as the Swedes and Germans love to do, then the meaning changes but that's not in the dictionary, only the individual words. So you resort to Google translate, the enemy of learning a language properly. It seems to know the word but can you trust it? Two minutes ago it got confused between 'register' and 'complain' or the classic 'marry' and 'poison'. You know the meaning now but you don't know what to do with it, is there something to click on? Something to email? Something to send in the post? Something to confirm by phone? Something that hasn't happened yet but will next week and then you can do one of the above options (as in my case)? In the end there is a lot of clicking on things and filling forms out that requires a liberal amount of hope, help boxes, lateral language thinking, rejection warnings in red saying you didn't fill this line in correctly and 'oh well, fuck it, I'll deal with it later".