Stage(d)

My summer of work is over. The Dutch summer has been over for quite a while, of course; but that’s secondary. For me it’s all done, I just did my last shift of my last full week at the place I work. From here on in I’ll be down to three and I’ll somehow have to make ends meet that way. Hopefully I can quickly find some extra freelance work. Let’s see what happens.

Still, I’m very happy that the next stage is about to start. My ‘getting my life sorted out in Holland’ stage took all of four months. Of course, it’s not completely sorted, some of the tail end of this stage might have to be dealt with in the next stage, but the line is definitely five days away; for then the stage ‘What the hell am I doing at university again’ will begin.

Hopefully that stage will quickly be followed by the ‘ah, so that’s what I’m doing at university’ stage, but nothing is certain. Well, that’s not true, one thing is certain, the Dutch are very good at pulling cash out of you any way they can.

I experienced that again today when I called about getting insured. You see, in the Netherlands you have to be insured. It’s THE LAW (did I mention that already?). So I called them up (because I have to get insured within four months) and asked about how much it would all cost, what the benefits would be and so forth.

They told me that they would love to insure me and they would need my bank details so that they could take the cash for this month, oh yes, and the cash for the last four months as well (seeing as you need to be insured, as that’s THE LAW (did I mention that already?) and therefore they would kindly insure you retroactively for the last four months. Somehow if I’d got into an accident in the last four months I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be so keen to insure retroactively).

So that is yet another attempt to extract cash from one of my bodily cavities. There’s a saying in Dutch that I rather liked when I first came back (I hadn’t heard it previously) and it roughly translates to ‘you can’t pull feathers of a naked chicken’. They might have the saying, but unfortunately they don’t pay it much heed. They’ve definitely managed to pull feathers from under my armpits and other ‘a’ areas (now my cheeks chaff).

I know this sounds very feathery (no pun intended) but it would be nice if they would sometimes let some of the down grow into full fledged plumage.

Of course, that’s not their primary ambition. They are probably also getting plucked by yet other organisations and their primary ambition is therefore to survive. And as we all know, to survive you need money. I just wish they wouldn’t need my money!