I set aside all of Thursday morning to apply for my “Foreigners Identification Number” (NIE), essentially a barcode which I need in order to be paid. (Bear in mind that the Spanish morning generally lasts until 2 or 2.30pm). I’d heard some horror stories about the officials’ vaguely unhealthy adherance to the rules, and on Wednesday around 11am I’d been to the Police Station where these golden tickets are issued and not been able to face waiting in a queue that stretched out of the station, down the street twenty metres or so, across the road and back up the opposite side.

So I resolved to get there at 8.30am the following morning. Of course, I didn’t make it until the office opening time of 9, and the queue was the same length as that of the day before. I wonder how many people sleep outside overnight. Fortunately, Liz, the fellow kiwi in the programme had got there earlier, and I was able to engage in a little bit of queue jumping. (Immigrants, eh Winnie? All the bloody same…).

As it was, we waited an hour and a half in the line. I was so happy to finally reach the counter, and I excitedly babbled in my bestest most formalest Spanish about how I needed a NIE, but I’ve been told that first I need to apply for an ID card, and here are all the documents you could possibly imagine demanding from me, a hundred copies of each, ma’am-please-thank-you.

The official looks disdainfully through my papers, then picks up the three passport photos they require, and tells me they’re too big. Too big? But they’re standard “passport photo” size! Which is when the busy body official sitting next to the one serving me chimes in and mentions that mine are “American” passport photo size, “and we’re in Spain now, not in your country”.

Can you see the smoke coming out of my ears?

I protest some, but they will have none of it. I am sent across the road, to the photo shop doing an absolutely roaring trade with photos and copies for Police Station rejects. Thankfully, the officer scribbles “not to queue again today” across a date stamp on my form, and I am able to go more or less straight back inside afterwards. I would have cried had I had to wait another hour and a half.

Second time around, my ID card application is succesful. We’ll post it to you in two months, they say. Again, I protest - I need the card to get the NIE, and I need the NIE to get paid. I’m waved away to another queue, where I wait to apply for the NIE. It’s a similar situation here - I’m sent away to make extra copies of a couple of documents, but allowed straight back in. Rubber stamp, rubber stamp, scribble, scribble, signature, signature, Gracias, that’ll take sixty days, see you then.

But… again I protest, telling them I need the number to get paid, please! A bit of fast talking, and suddenly she’s saying “oh, why didn’t you say so. If you’re part of the Conversation Assistants programme that’ll be ten days.” Scribble, scribble, rubber stamp, rubber stamp, “Come back in two weeks”.

I walk out feeling pretty elated that the whole epic had taken little more than two hours.

Other posts by Katie Llanos-Small