Thursday, October 16, 2008

Give me my B.S.!

The great thing about Holland is that everything is well-organised. Sure, it is a very liberal country, but it isn't a Mad-Max or Waterworld type of liberal chaos. For example, prostitution is taxed, regulated and unionised. Prostitutes are part of the Dutch society. I am not. I don't understand. But then, I also don't exist yet. I don't have my number. I'm unemployed, uninsured, undesireable and uninspired. All because I don't have my Burgers Service number. (This has very little to do with burgers, as I will explain below).


The problem began in 1989, when a four-year-old version of me immigrated to New Zealand. I did not then have my own passport and I had never worked (my attempts at child-acting failed miserably) meaning that I did not yet have a tax or a citizen's number assigned to me, although five years later they began tattooing the numbers on newborn babies to prevent the mess that I am in now which came about because I am attempting to rejoin the Dutch society without this special number that usually is printed on your passport but since I requested my first passport in 1999 from the embassy in Wellington, they did not request my number from the tax department in Holland and left the space blank, and now the allocation and management of these numbers has been recently delagated to local city halls, where I am still registered despite my 19 year absence although they can't just allocate a number to me without proof that I live somewhere, and that I know my parent's birthdays - which I didn't, but I will never forget now, and my previous address in Japan which they will never check up on, and even then it will take up to six weeks process the paperwork to prove that I am a citizen here despite me already being on the computer files and being able to present my Dutch passport which would be too simple and neanderthal for a country where technically, hookers could go on strike, so I am currently unable to work, open a bank account, get insurance or even exist as a citizen of a country in which I am unquestionably a citizen of.

It is really that simple. All I need right now is my B.S. number.

1 comment:

Miranda said...

Missing you! Come back to Wellington to sort everything out :)