To stamp or not to Stamp

A while back, I heard a report on my favorite BBC podcast From Our Own Correspondent. It was a report from Belgrade, Serbia. This was within the last year so it was long after Communism collapsed in the former Yugoslavia. But the correspondent had some issues. She had to get her residency, no wait, she wanted to activate a land line... something very petty and simple or so you would think. Basically the moral of the story is she recommended anybody that anybody who moves to a socialist or former socialist country to invest in some rubber stamps. She couldn't get the phone line up and running until she had a stamped piece of paper from her local council saying she lived there, which in turn would send her to a court attesting to the fact that the council says the lady lives in Belgrade and thus issuing her with another stamped piece of paper. With these two pieces of paper, the phone line finally worked.

I had a similar experience today. I needed to do a money transfer to Maputo for a t shirt order I made in Maputo. I made SURE I had all the numbers, my passport, the amount AND a pen. I thought I was all set. I go in and the man at the first level of Dante's Socialist Inferno told me that I had to make the transfer "por escrito." "written" so I asked for the form. He said I could use a regular word document! I nearly died laughing. This is in Barclay's Bank! So I ran to my office and typed up the paper. It was along the rough English translation of this.

I IanHefele of the American Passport $%^&*^%^^ issued in Washington DC....



You get the picture. :) Anyway, Mozambique is very particular about their names. Everything official in this country tends to have me named as IAN PAUL HEFELE. Everywhere but Barclay's Bank that is. So I get there having flourished my signature over a piece of paper that just looked so....wrong. I got back and was told to sit. That I can do. Ivan Heefel was called many many times and I finally realized that was me. So apparently Ian PAUL Hefele doesn't exist. However seeing as I was already in the bank and already signed the paper, I wasn't going to do it again. The clerk was going to make me write it all again and come back later. All because of PAUL. (Thanks Dad!) I got a little snarky at him and asked for white out. He didn't understand. I told him I didn't have all day to play around in the bank, printing it out one more time would waste trees and NO I just wasn't going to do that. So, he told me to sign UNDER the dotted line and all would be well.

The moral of my story is if I had the rubber stamp saying ANYTHING in English, I could've stamped out the Paul part and saved the poor clerk some snark.

Happy Weekend