Here’s what I thought was going on. I’ve been here a little over six years, on short-term permits, and after five years one can apply for a permit for unlimited residency. But I didn’t do that, because they do income tests that I couldn’t meet. My current permit is tied to my appointment at the university, which ran out January 1st. But since I became Dr de Jager quite recently, I could apply under the rules for “Highly educated recent graduates”, granting a year to look for work. If I found a good enough job in that year, that would give me the income to use the five-year rule to get permanent residency (or near-as-dammit).

Almost every single statement in the above summary is wrong.

First up, the five-year rule doesn’t apply to my first two years here, which were officially under a study exchange programme with New Zealand. It also wouldn’t apply to a “work-seeking” year, which in any case I couldn’t apply for because while I did graduate here my permit at the time was for work, not study.¹

Secondly, in order to apply the five-year rule I would have to continue working, on the same kind of permit I have now, for five years. This probably would have been possible, if I had known about it in advance: another semester of teaching would have done it. But I didn’t, and now it’s too late. Because:

Thirdly, and most importantly, the five-year rule involves a most strict attention to continuous legal residency: the one and a half months between the end of my previous permit and the date of my application for a new one would reset my accumulated residency to zero.

Oops.

(The same rules apply to work: lacking a contract for the month of February would interfere just as much as lacking a residence permit for January.)

Perhaps you can imagine my distress at this news. It must have been quite a sight, because the nice lady at the IND, after explaining this to me twice, had to go off and fetch some backup.

The first thing the backup asked me was if I had a girlfriend. (You might think, given my beardy good looks and charming personality, that I would get this sort of thing rather often; if you thought that, you would be surprised to learn that in fact I don’t. Pretty much never, in fact, and especially not from government employees during working hours.) Somewhat bemused, I answered that yes, I did. Was she Dutch? No, Greek. Even better! Did she live here? Yes, we live together. Problem solved!

As a family member of an EU citizen registered as a Dutch resident, I am entitled to a five-year residence and work permit. (As an added bonus, at the end of those five years I can apply for permanent residency.) We have to prove that we’re an honest-truly couple, but we don’t have to be married. (There are plenty of good reasons to get married, but “because I need a residence permit” is not one of them.) It will cost €41, instead of €331 (!).

In some ways it’s almost a disappointment. I had the vague idea that after working at a university for four years, and doing an MSc and a PhD at Dutch institutions, the qualifications I had accumulated might help argue the case for letting me live in the country. Instead it’s who I’m sleeping with that makes the difference.

So much for the knowledge economy.

Notes:

1. Slightly more complicated, for those really keeping track: under a related rule I could indeed apply for a zoekjaar, but it would force me to get a separate work permit, which is a terrible pain. One of the major attractions of the permanent residency option is to be able to work wherever, rather than constantly having to have my contracts approved by the immigration folk.

To Dutch students starting out in Artificial Intelligence!

It’s going to be great fun, shaping their innocent beginning-programmer minds. The course is about half Prolog and half AI-as-search; and I’m completely In Charge. (There will be assistents for the lab sessions, we expect about 30-40 students so it’s a bit much for one person to give individual help.)

Anyone who has talked to me in the last six months will know that I’ve been a bit stressed about my prospects after graduation. The job market for programmers is depressed, and for recent philosophy-of-language graduates it’s nonexistent. Not being from the EU makes life even more difficult — indeed, for a while I was worried that I might have to leave the country even before my defence. All those problems look set to evaporate now, at least for another half-year. If I do a good job they might even want me back, who knows?

And lost it.

They were awfully apologetic when I went to check out, and got me to write my mobile number on a sheet of paper (in case they found it later that day) along with my postal address (in case they didn’t).

Then they lost the sheet of paper.

So they sent my residence permit to the Dutch embassy in Brussels.

Who hopefully haven’t lost it, but at this point I’m not willing to make any bets…

I’m not kidding, this is excellent news. I’d expected to have to fork out much more.

I’ve written about the incident in question elsewhere, so I won’t go into all that again (it was a particularly pointless and petty piece of bureaucratic nonsense which tends to get me a bit steamed up). The important point is that date of that entry: late March. Just over six months ago. Which means that in principle the fine should have gone up twice in the interim, bloating like a rotting fruit with each increase worsening the splatter to come when it inevitably falls from the tree.

Ahem. You might ask, then, why I didn’t pay the damn thing? Well, the situation was a bit complicated. I was still officially registered in Zaandam, so that’s the address they sent the bill to. To a house which in the interim was pulled down. And then by the time I had a new legal address, the rot had set in to the point that I was too terrified of the fallout to even prod the damn thing gently to assess the danger, let alone actually shake the tree and make it fall.

But today’s post brought the bill, to my new address — it seems the wheels of authority grind even more slowly than I would have expected (I’ve been registered here for two months now). And the relocation seems to have magically reset the countdown, so all that remains is the original (pointless and petty, but small) fine.

I never would have thought I’d be so happy to pay the Justitie 20 €.

Very important, that. Especially, don’t send your passport through the washing machine when you’re pretty soon going to need it (for instance, when you get back from Poland and within a month you have to leave again for Italy). Because if you’re as far from home as I am, you’ll have to send an application for a new one to London, and pay them lots of money. If you’re on an even tighter schedule than mine was, you’ll have to pay then lots and lots of money (the cost for urgent three-day processing is a cool £124 —yep, that’s pounds— plus thirty for courier service).

On the plus side, I have a pretty new passport. Unfortunately, I got my old one in the days when a passport was valid for ten years, so the new five-year deadline actually cuts its lifetime down by two. But the new one does have a “contactless integrated circuit chip” in the back. The notice on the chip says “take caution that this passport not become wet, folded or mutilated.” Wish they’d had that on the old one.

Speaking of which, they also sent it back. So I still have my (pathetically small) collection of visa stamps. They chopped various strategic bits off, so it won’t be of any use to anyone — not that it would have anyway, the washing machine damage has left all the information visible but the passport itself looking like an extremely unprofessional fake. Some pretty nice ink-spreading effects though.

Kids: don’t do this at home. Or if you absolutely have to, choose Mummy’s or Daddy’s passport, ok? You want to take care of your own.

That’s not a typo.

There’s construction work going on near my house, for about two blocks on both sides of a major street. One of the two cycle lanes is blocked off with portable barriers at each end. It’s a bit odd they chose that side to blockade, because off the side of that lane is a three metre fence, and on the other side of the that fence is where the construction is going on. It’s even odder, given that the only construction I’ve seen actually in progress is on the other side of the road entirely.

So that’s the cycle lane I was using, on my way home at seven in the evening. Whether they’ve blockaded the correct side of the street or not is kind of a moot point by then, since the construction crew have knocked off and there’s not a soul in sight, except for the cyclists doing like I’m doing, taking the short way home.

And except for the five police officers and one motorcycle traffic warden, waiting at the dead end.

I honestly thought there was something going on, an accident or at least a traffic diversion. But no, all they wanted from me was ID. So they could fine me 20 euro. (While the dude was painstakingly filling out the form —not the sharpest knife in the drawer— I saw one of his compatriots letting two tourists go their merry way, after they protested that they didn’t understand what the signs meant. I fumed silently and refrained from asking them how they thought they should enterpret a crossed-out bicycle, a detour arrow, and a barrier across the lane.)

After I accepted my fine I asked the guy what the deal was. “Well,” he said, “you’re not allowed to cycle here,” and pointed at the signs. I said I understood that, but I wondered why not. “They’re working on the road here,” he replied.

I looked at the road, conspicuously devoid of workers — indeed, entirely empty now that some kind soul had gone back to the open end of the block and closed the two metre gap in the middle of the barriers. I looked back at the officer, with that dreamlike feeling that the person you’re talking too is seeing an entirely different reality to the one you’re inhabiting. “They’re working on the road?” I asked, and checked again to be sure: still lots of road, still nobody working. “Well,” he said, “you’re not allowed to cycle here,” and he pointed again at the signs.

I took my fine and went home.

(If this sounds a little bitter, well, it is. Due to some unexpected costs —which I’ll blog about when they’re ancient enough history that I can laugh at them, instead of weeping— I’ve spent the last week eating potatoes even more than I usually do. Today is payday, but to usher that in by paying the same amount in pointless petty fines that I spent all week on food, well, it’s left me in a bit of a bad mood.)

I have in fact received a letter saying that my residence permit has been approved. I had also made an appointment to get a sticker in passport, which I could use to get my sofi number. So I arrived this morning at the appointment, only to be told that such a sticker in fact constitutes an extension of a previous permit while a new one is being considered, and since the new permit has now been approved (some three days earlier) I couldn’t be given the sticker.

Ok, so I should be able to use my brand new permit to get a sofi number instead, right? Not so fast, Joe: the permit has been approved, sure, but it won’t arrive for another month. During which time I have… um, well, no evidence of its existence apart from the letter, which the nice man at the IND assured me would not be sufficient to request a sofi number from the tax office.

So I spent the morning on the train for nothing — I’m just glad I live relatively close to Rijswijk, it could have been a four hour journey. (Yes, you can only get these stickers in one place in the country.) And it cost me 17 euro, which I consider a bit excessive given that (a) I didn’t get anything out of the trip, and (b) because I don’t have a sofi number I’m only drawing two-thirds pay, and since tomorrow is two-thirds payday I’m now down to a total balance of €15.40.

I’ve been looking forward to real employment for so long, I’m getting tunnel vision.

To become a fully paid-up member of the University staff, I need a sofi number (which identifies me throughout the EU for taxpaying purposes). I went today to apply for this, and was told I need a visum or residence permit that includes a work permit (unlike my student visum) — if I’m not working, I don’t need a tax number, so they won’t give me one. However I can’t apply for a working visum until I have an employer…

I think this vicious circle is breakable. I think I can convince the University to fill out the visum application without having a sofi number. The downside of this plan appears to be that this will leave me as a formal employee of the UvA, but not actually being paid anything.

Somewhere, some faceless bureaucrat is laughing at me.

Ministers are particularly concerned about exam results this year, having failed to achieve their 2004 target of 75 per cent of 14-year-olds reaching the level expected in English. Just 71 per cent reached the standard, despite a multi-million pound Government strategy aimed at improving lessons in secondary schools.

The solution:

Examiners marking [ the national curriculum English test ] have been told not to deduct marks for incorrect spelling on the main writing paper, worth nearly a third of the overall marks.

Ok, let’s think about this a moment. Why do we (they) set national targets for student achievement? If your answer is the same as mine, then making the exam easier isn’t going to help.

(Headsup by the unreasonable man.)