This fall, I'm working in Stockholm, Sweden, while my home remains in Trondheim, Norway.
Most of the time, it works fine, but occasionally, things just weird me out.... such as this week, when I wanted to pay for my gym membership.
First some background:
- I live in Norway, but work in Sweden. Which means that I have to pay tax in Sweden.
- Normally, Swedish authorities keep track of people by "personnumber" - the YYMMDD of your birthdate + a 4-digit serial number.
- A "personnummer" is only given to people who live in Sweden. I don't.
- So the Swedish authorities have said they won't give me a regular Swedish personnumber, they'll give me a "Samordningsnummer" - just like a personnumber, but they add 60 to the day of my birth, just to be different.
So far, so good - my bank allows me to create an account using that, my payroll authorities accept that for paying taxes, and so on. All is well.
Then I go down to the gym at Sats Zenit, sign up for a year's membership, and sign the papers that will allow them to deduct the monthly fee from my account.
No can do.
It turns out that their autogiro system (not the bank's, not the authorities', but the gym's) requires both a bank account number and a personnumber in order to deduct money.
And they won't accept my "samordningsnummer".
Not a big deal. I can afford to just pay the year's fees. But somehow, this little episode brought home to me that the way I currently live, I'm indeed between places - not all the way there.
And the world isn't quite used to people doing that.
