When I first came back to the UK and started working in London I was given a temporary National Insurance Number. The Fulham Broadway DSS Office was instrumental in getting me set up and told me that another number would eventually come through. It never did.

A couple of years later I moved to Dundee, and a new job. I re-applied through the Dundee DSS Office for my National Insurance Number. The lady there was very helpful and friendly, telling me that in a few weeks I would get a letter through from the Kirkaldy branch of Inland Revenue with my number. Just as predicted a few weeks later I did get a letter with my number through but it came from the Glasgow Branch.

I thought nothing of it until a little while later I got another letter though from the Kirkaldy Branch telling me of another new National Insurance Number. So I had two new numbers and wasn’t sure which one to use. Since I was already at my new job on my temporary number, I filed all three numbers in my expanding file and promptly forgot about the situation, until I moved to Bournemouth to take up a lectureship there.

On the new employee forms I was faced with the dilemna of not knowing which number I was supposed to put down. I rang Inland Revenue for advice and was told, yes there were three National Insurance Numbers for Simone O’Callaghan, two of them female, one male all with my old address. So insulted at being thought of as a man, I asked how on earth I was down as such. The lady on the phone looked into the system and identified that my temporary number issued in London,  ended in M which meant I was a man. Was the idiot at Fulham Broadway deaf, dumb and blind? Or were they just vindictive?

“What about the other two numbers? Why are there two” I asked
“You applied for a number in Dundee, didn’t you?”
“Yes”
“Well that is where the Kirkaldy number came from”
“And what about the Glasgow one, I never applied for one there. Where did that come from?”
“Have you ever lived in the UK before”
“Yes when I was a baby”
“In Glasgow?”
“yes”
“You were automatically given a National Insurance Number when you turned 16”

The sheer stupidity of the system!!!! The agonies I have had to go through in my fruitless attempt to prove I was once a permanent resident, and then the hell I went through to get my permanent residency for the second time, when all along, there was a government department that had documented that not only was I a permanent resident from 1974, but that (wrongly, but in light of previous suffering, to my advantage) I had lived in Britain  ever since then.