You Can’t Have Your Anna-Cake…

A meeting at the end of Week 4? Certainly—my schedule’s wide-open. Ask me about Week 14 and I’ll be less assured. Suggest Week 34 and I probably won’t know what month we’re talking about. Perhaps I’m loath to engage in math to plan my holidays (Swedes know which weeks those are)—because, not having grown up with the system, math is required. After years in Sweden, my brain is still stubbornly holding out on this one.
Other Swedish ways of computing have been easier to adapt to. While one aspect of talking about time left me late for dinner more than once (halv ett = 12:30, not 13:30 as it sounds to the English ear), I found the 24-hour clock easy enough to use. The tendency of younger Swedes to answer the question “How old are you?” with “Eighty-four” or “Seventy-six” seemed convoluted at first. More math was involved, but I made the calculations.

I assume this last habit has something to do with the personnummer which all Swedes receive at birth—the key to life in Sweden. Before I had one, I couldn’t get a library card, rent a DVD, or start a bank account (though buying liquor didn’t seem to pose a problem). I found I could not apply for a job I wanted without the number, and yet I was told I couldn’t receive the number until I had a job. Catch-22.
Swedes sometimes marvel that there are industrialized countries that don’t use the personnummer system. I’ve been assured it’s just like the Canadian social security (SIN) number system. But SIN’s don’t have any connection to our birth dates, our sex, or the towns we were born in—and we don’t usually get them until we begin to work. We use them so seldom that many couldn’t recite their SIN for you if they wanted too. And they probably wouldn’t: we’re taught to keep our SIN’s strictly private. So without handy personnummers the organizing and identifying of people in my country can become rather chaotic. We rely to a ridiculous degree on full names, and are trained to use our first, middle, and surnames on all remotely official documents.

I continued this practice in Sweden with unexpected results: curiously, at both the dentist’s and the doctor’s they attempted to summon me by my middle name. Then Apoteket’s labels cited only my middle name. Official mail began arriving addressed to my middle name. Worse still, on one letter my first name was in quotation marks next to my middle name—as though I were a child who had made up her own Tolkien, fairy-tale name and the authorities thought it best to humour me. Clearly my real name must be the middle one—the common, easy-to-pronounce Anna.
But this experience—which had begun to feel faintly Kafkaesque—did have a reasonable explanation. The statistics of women’s first and tilltals names (the name you are actually called) from the Statistiska centralbyrå state that Anna is (by almost 25 000!) the most popular female tilltals name in the country. Still. While I’d been happy to go along with naming ages by birth-years, height in centimetres, weight in grams, ten kilometres as a mil, and all twenty-four hours of the day, being converted myself into the 114 746th Anna was out of the question. I was only a little bit tempted by the ‘name day’ cake and festive singing this concession would grant me. But no—principles before cake. Principles. Before. Cake.