François de La Rochefoucauld was a 17th Century French nobleman, best known for his published collection of over 500 maxims, mostly reflections on human behaviour and character. He did not pull his punches, and, in the introduction to his Maximes, he shrewdly wrote:

…the best approach for the reader to take would be to put in his mind right from the start that none of these maxims apply to himself in particular, and that he is the sole exception, even though they appear to be generalities. After that I guarantee that he will be the first to endorse them and he will believe that they do credit to the human spirit.

I mention him only because I want to cite one of his maxims, by way of introducing this week’s ramblings:

In the misfortunes of our best friends, we find something that is not unpleasing.

It is in this generous spirit that I offer you the following story.

Let’s start at the very beginning. You basically don’t exist in Portugal until you get a NIF (Número de Identificação Fiscal, or Tax Identification Number). Without a NIF, you can’t open a bank account or buy property. So, of course, when I first visited Portugal for 4 days, principally to acquire the services of a lawyer, open a bank account and start the process of finding and buying a property, the first thing the lawyer had me do was acquire a NIF. To expedite this process, I had to furnish an EU address through which I could be contacted, which I did. All went smoothly, as you know, until…

A couple of weeks ago, tiring of reorganizing our  book collection (I can recommend by spine colour, for its aesthetic effect, and by original publication date, to remind yourself that Cervantes and Shakespeare were contemporaries), I went into the Portuguese Tax Authority website, in the hope of changing our EU contact address to our address in Portugal. Navigation was actually fairly straightforward, since bureaucratic language in Portuguese is not that different from the English equivalent.

I started by providing my NIF, and then was asked for my password, of course. At that point, I realized that I had tried to sign in, rather than registering, so I started again. All went smoothly until I came to a page that I did not understand at all. A quick copy and paste into google translate established that I was being asked to choose a security question and provide an answer. Now, I am used to objective security questions that yield an unequivocal answer, such as my mother’s maiden name or the name of my primary (elementary) school. The questions I was invited to choose from, however, were all subjective.

What is your favourite film?
 Oh, I don’t know! Citizen Kane? Or is that a bit obvious? Les Enfants du Paradis? Just a tad prententious? (Not really pretentious François Truffaut once said that he would give up all of his films to have directed Les Enfants du Paradis. I can’t find the film online, but you can watch a charming 4-minute excerpt on youtube here.) It’s a Wonderful Life? Is that really the corny image I want to project?

What is your favourite book? Bernice suggested The Bible, on the grounds that I was more likely to remember that. I also felt that it was a good choice for the Tax Authority of a staunchly Catholic country.

What is your favourite colour? I don’t think I’ve got one.

I was beginning to feel completely characterless.

Next, I was asked to provide my password, again. Of course, I still didn’t have one, so I selected the option to set a new password. A popup informed me that a temporary password would be sent to my contact address. At this point I gave the whole thing up as a bad job.

Then, a week ago, my UK contact informed me that a letter had arrived. I asked him to open it, and send me a photo of the contents. Of course, the disadvantage of this method is that I didn’t have a soft copy that I could paste into google translate, and the quality of the photo I was sent wasn’t good enough for my Translator app camera to identify the text accurately. All of this meant that I had no easy way of finding out what the letter was about. However, 20 minutes of deciphering, typing short phrases into google translate, comparing the letter with other documents in my possession and, alright, blind guesswork, led me to the conclusion that the letter was a demand from the Portuguese tax authorities for the first of two payments of the property tax due on our purchase of the house in Penamacor. Impressive, no? Either that, or it was an eviction notice…or possibly a two-for-one offer on Portuguese wine.  

Having established the nature of the letter, and understanding that the bill had to be paid before the end of May, I then turned my attention to the section of the letter that outlined Instruções sobre as formas de pagamento. Payment, I learnt, can be made at a Smart Multibank ATM. This is, by the way, an ATM at which you can pay bills, order theatre tickets, and perform other advanced transactions. Of course, you need to be in Portugal to do that, so this was not such a smart method for me. Payment can also be made by cheque, but we don’t have a chequebook, so that was out as well.

Fortunately – if that’s the word I’m looking for – the letter also gave the address of the Tax Authority portal, which I then visited again, in the hope that I could pay the tax online. After hardly any time at all, I navigated my way to a section that gave the Tax Authority details for bank transfer, and stressed the two items of information that had to be included as a comment in any bank transfer – my NIF and the document reference of the demand for payment.

Now we were cooking! Or at least in the advanced stages of food prep. I grabbed my phone and went into our bank account app, entered all the details of the transfer and advanced to the approval screen, where, of course, I was confronted by the message: Bank transfer requires enabling the Matrix functionality, which you have not done. Those of you take copious notes each week will remember that enabling the Matrix functionality requires receiving an SMS with a one-time code and keying it in at an ATM, and that we are unable to receive, when in Portugal, SMS messages on our registered phone, unable to reach an ATM when in Israel, and unable to change our registered phone. I am thinking that, on our next visit to Portugal, I might leave my debit card with Micha’el, request my bank to send me the SMS immediately after our return to Israel, and forward the SMS to Micha’el, for him to enable the functionality at an ATM. (Rereading this, I wonder whether I actually want to leave Micha’el my debit card and have him be the only person who knows the password for advanced functionality.)

Meanwhile, I had to find another way of paying the tax. It seemed to me that I had no choice but to bother Micha’el to pay it for us. So, I phoned him to explain the situation. He, of course, readily agreed, and I sent him the bank details and the two vital pieces of information (NIF and document reference number). Soon afterwards, Micha’el sent me a photo of the bank transfer confirmation. I immediately spotted that there was no mention of the vital information; when I asked Micha’el, he explained that he had tried to make the transfer from an ATM, but at some point had not understood how to proceed; he had then gone into the bank, and asked a teller to carry out the transfer. She was not very sympathetic, because she felt he should have used the ATM, and, as a consequence, although he had stressed to her the importance of the vital information, she had been fairly brusque, and had apparently omitted it. Micha’el suggested I email the Tax Authority with the vitals, and I thought to myself: ‘Well, that sounds straightforward’. (This is, as you probably realise, one of those dramatic irony lines that make you smile wryly when you watch the film for a second time.)

So, back I went onto the Tax Authority website, and looked for an email address. I couldn’t find one anywhere, but I did eventually come across, and was able to download, a file with contact details for all the offices, branches, departments and officials of the Tax Authority – addresses, office reception hours, phone numbers and email addresses. Fortunately, this was an Excel file, so I was able to filter the hundreds of rows and search for the department I needed. Less fortunately, the department I needed was not listed.

However, on another tab of the Excel file I did find the right department. Scrolling across to the column headed Email Address, I found that on this tab there was no such column. There was a phone number, and I could, I hear you suggesting, have just phoned the office.

If you live in Israel, you are very used to phoning a Government office and hearing, in Hebrew, ‘For Hebrew, press 1’, then, in English, ‘For English, press 2’, and so on, for Arabic, Russian and Amharic. In Britain, if I remember the last time I visited a hospital, interpreters are available for six or seven languages, and explanatory pamphlets are available in 20 others. Well, let me tell you, in my experience, Portugal is, by comparison, insular; indeed, I find Iberia as a whole is peninsular. When I was working as a technical writer for a large software company serving the telecommunications industry, I captured minutes for meetings working with clients in 20 or so different countries. I can only remember three instances when the meetings were not conducted in English. In Russia, following the mass immigration to Israel of Jews from Russia, our company always assembled a complete team of native Russian speakers: managers, software engineers and technical writer, and all meetings, emails, documentation were in Russian. The company touted it as our competitive edge over our rivals in America and elsewhere. In Austria, the client insisted on conducting meetings in German, although I am quite sure that the client participants all spoke reasonable English. In this case, the client wanted to ensure that it had the upper hand in meetings. In Spain, the client insisted on meetings and documentation being in Spanish, because the participants’ English was simply not good enough, and because insisting on using the Spanish language was a matter of national pride.

So, I knew that there was almost certainly no point in phoning the Tax Authority, not with my command of Portuguese and my collocutor’s likely command of English.

In the end, I found a page dedicated to non-residents and foreign nationals, which included an option to submit a question in writing. This seemed like my best shot. So, I composed a message in English, explaining the situation, giving details of the transfer and all the vitals, and asking for the payment to be credited to me. For good measure, I asked whether, at the same time, the Tax Authority could update my contact address to our Portuguese address, and also, in any reply, could use my email address rather than my postal address. Feeling rather pleased with myself, I pasted that message into google translate, pasted the translation into the message box on the website, and Hey Presto! I got the popup message: You have exceeded the maximum of 500 characters. There then followed 15 minutes of chiseling away the superfluous material, like Michelangelo, to reveal the essential message perfectly formed within, then google translating it and pasting the result. After four or five attempts, I finally got the Portuguese down to 520 characters, while still preserving an almost coherent narrative. I then discovered that the heading of the message did not count towards the 500-character limit, so I added my email address to the heading of the message and reached the magic 500.

Tolstoy can scarcely have felt a greater sense of achievement on completing the final sentence of War and Peace than I did when I hit Send.

Not 15 minutes later, my contact phoned me to say that a letter had arrived. It transpired that this contained the code for registering with the Tax Authority. He relayed the code to me, using our typical fumbling approximation of the NATO alphabet. (Michael McIntyre, who I know I have referenced before, has an amusing 2 minutes on this at the beginning of this clip.)

My pulse racing, I went back to the Tax Authority website, entered my NIF, was asked to choose a security question, selected What is your favourite book? and typed in The Bible. I then got a popup message: This is incorrect. Try again. This time I selected What is your favourite film? and typed in Citizen Kane. Success! I felt as though my each-way bet on the Grand National had come in second. Unfortunately, I forgot that this was an accumulator bet. I was next asked for my password, and entered the password my contact had given me. Incorrect password. You have two more attempts. It was only at this point that I realized that my second visit to the Tax Authority website had generated a new password to be posted to my contact address, whereas the password I had used was the first one generated, which I had subsequently rendered obsolete.

So now, I am waiting to receive my second password, and waiting to hear whether the Tax Authority is able to locate and assign my payment. A lot of waiting. Fortunately, I have several weighty books to read….and I’m not going anywhere, not even Portugal to see our grandson, who seems to be getting very grown up.