Swedish bureaucrazy

Moving into the new flat has been a headache for a few reasons, but now we have the cherry on the cake. As my housemate Anton thinks, it is some sort of tacit racism against foreigners.

While I'm not so pessimistic about the issue, it still makes me shake my head. Bureaucracy in Sweden is really an art form unto itself. For a developed country that is seen as leading in many respects, I can't imagine how all this crazy paperwork can exist. At the same time I understand that it must exist, or Sweden would cease to be.

We have been trying to get the internet connected at home. At first we understood that we needed to look for our own provider and so we started looking around for different deals. We settled on a company called Bredbandsbolaget and called them.

Unfortunately the robot that answers the phone in Swedish doesn't make it very easy to get things done. I got a friend to call up and she told me that in fact we already had Bredbandsbolaget connected to our flat and that the contract had already been paid for the coming year. The only thing we needed to do was make an account with them.

I went to the shop and bought a router. The salesman tried to upsell me to a model of router that I clearly didn't need (bad salesmanship). I went home and we plugged it in. The internet worked. For two days.

After the second day the internet was cut off, so I called the company and asked what had happened — perhaps it was technical difficulties or maybe we really needed to make an account.

I got through to a person on the end of the line with the help of a friend who told me how to navigate through the Swedish robot. The guy on the other end of the line wasn't much more helpful than the computer that I couldn't understand speaking. He told me to view the account I needed the personal number of the account that was there before. The account no longer existed and the person who lived here prior was gone, so clearly it was impossible for me to give him this number. He told me the only way to activate the internet (which was already active) was to make a free account with my personal number.

The thing is that I don't have a personal number. Because I am staying in Sweden for less than 12 months of study, I get a temporary number, which doesn't cut it for certain things. Temporary number means I can't make an account to turn on already functioning internet that has already been paid for for the whole year.

Later we tried with Anton's number - he has a real one because he will be in Sweden for two years at least. They wouldn't let us use this one either because you need to have been in the country for more than 6 months before you can use the service.

Its mindless.