Normalement

For those of you not familiar with ‘normalement’, it’s a French term that means “well, it should happen on that day at that time, but it probably won’t”. For example, if you’ve made an appointment to have something repaired or installed, your appointment time could be Tuesday. Normalement. The guy’ll show up unless he finds something better to do. It’s a bit like the way Italian trains run. They’re on schedule, unless they’re on strike. If it’s sunny and a Thursday, they might be on strike. Then again, they might not. This is the source of my prefacing many things with ‘all things being equal’. In my case, it isn’t a refusal to make a commitment, it’s a supersticious disclaimer: I’ll be there unless some in my universe explodes. In other words, you can count on me if nothing unforeseen happens.

Very few things have gone according to my schedule along the path of this Swedish adventure. I naively thought that if I approached everything systematically, then it would go according to plan. Normalement. My schedule never matched the great ‘they’’s and seeing as ‘they’ make the master schedule, well, you get the picture. Has it all worked out in the wash? ya. Has it been a pain in the neck. ya. The pain continues because I’ve discovered that Sweden, like France, has a version of normalement - their administrative processes move at glacial speed.

The ticket to success as a resident rather than a visitor is a Swedish Personal Number. Without it, you can’t do much. It’s your ticket to health care, getting a bank account, getting a phone. It’s supposed to take 2 weeks to arrive in the mail. Normalement. There’s a backlog right now so A,E, &I are still waiting. Peter already has his, so we were able to arrange hook up here at the flat for phone, tv, and internet through him. Apparently, once the tv line is hooked up, you still have to wait (2 months?) for cable. Nothing will work until then. The modem for the internet arrives in the mail sometime after the man’s been there to connect things. He was here on Tuesday. No modem so far but hope springs eternal....

Then there’s parking. It’s all street parking. Once Peter gets his ‘official’ company car (more waiting without an end date), we’ll have a pass and won’t have to feed the meter anymore. Streets are cleaned once a week. On our street, it’s Onsdag (Wednesday) between 8 & 10. So yesterday, I dutifully moved the car before 8, moved it back after 10, and fed the meter enough to last until noon today. Then I got a parking ticket. Apparently it’s a bit of an ex-pat right of passage, getting parking tickets. I think it’s a scam. At 2 in the afternoon, I was parked where I was supposed to be, and I got a ticket? 400Kr later...

All this waiting is killing me. I’m a very patient person when I know how long I have to wait for, but when there aren’t any timelines? Or when nobody sticks to them? It’s making me crazy. Are there bigger problems in the universe than pokey administrative processing? Yes. Someday this will all make for a good story. But at the moment, when life’s been up in the air for going on 9 months, you can appreciate the desire to be settled. As settled as we are, we aren’t. I was told it will take a year to feel settled and ‘at home’. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait that long.