Day 6 - A video camera arrives & a bank account disappears

Sourced a Panasonic video camera today from Gerald (thanks)! This was great but then I encountered the Swedish Red Tape when I went to open a bank account.

The bank that I approached, obviously had no concept of customer service because there was a queue (a line for the USA readers) of people waiting to be served that took 45 minutes for me to navigate. You might think that my comments are unfair but this queue is built into the system of (non)service. When I entered the same bank several days earlier there was a similar long queue and on that date I mistook this to be an unusual occurrence but on returning I found it to be the norm.

This was further supported by a system of issuing "tickets" from a ticket machine to enable one to see one of the tellers. This queue was obviously an inconvenience to business customers because the "ticket" machine allowed business customers to insert a special card with a readable strip that then put them into a shorter queue for attention.

When I finally got to see the teller and explained that I wanted to open an account, I was told that I could possibly open an account with them because I had all the correct forms, but that because I didn't have a Swedish personal ID number (issued by the Swedish tax office) that I would not be able to put any money into the account or take any out without the greatest of difficulties and that while it was possible to open such an account, that this teller have never actually opened an account like this for any customer in his life and he didn't know how to do it!

I was somewhat flummoxed by this as my prior research and advice from my international coordinator at my university here in Sweden had indicated that it was no problem to open an account with this particular branch because they dealt with many international students who were in a similar situation to me. My university had issued me with a pseudo Swedish ID number to help navigate the red tape and had assured me that this would suffice at this particular bank and branch.

Obviously, none of these many hundreds of other students have ever lasted long enough in the queue to get to speak with this particular teller or to test the pseudo ID number before.

The option of either getting a real Swedish Personal ID number or not getting a local Swedish bank account leaves me in somewhat of a dilemma; according to the Swedish Tax Office web-site, once I register for a Swedish Personal ID, I become legally liable to pay Swedish taxes on my entire world income. Now while this income isn't huge, it isn't something that I wish to further reduce by sharing it with the Swedish bureaucrats. On the other hand, if I don't get a local bank account then every time I need to pay my rent it costs me another NZ$10 to pay the bill via the Kassa service and every time I use my Visa card to pay for anything else I get charged an exorbitant currency conversion fee. Dilemma, dilemma!

I will procrastinate over this for a couple of days to see if any other solution pops up.