A Surprising Way to Improve Your Turkish: Bureaucracy (Part II)

Read the first part of ”A Surprising Way to Improve Your Turkish: Bureaucracy” here.

Buoyed by your success on the phone to the bank you walk for fifteen minutes in the heat of the day, trying to find as much shade as possible. You are pleasantly surprised, but hot, when the bank actually turns out to be at the address you were given. This isn’t something you can always count on in Turkey. Once inside you bask in the lovely cold klima, and slowly read the choices on the ticket machine. Finally you press the best option for an individual, bireysel müşteri and use your Kimlik Numarası to get a number. Luckily you only have to wait a few minutes before you are at the counter, explaining that you’ve started a new job at the university. You show your new university identity card and explain that you need a pin number. You tell the woman you tried to register by phone but the bank doesn’t have your mobile number on file. When you finish you smile expectantly at her.

She tells you you’re in the wrong queue. You follow her pointing finger and say hello to the five men already waiting to be looked after by one woman sitting at a row of four desks. You practice numbers by establishing who is last in line. By the time it’s your turn again it’s much easier the second time around to explain in Turkish why you’re here. The clerk has you sit and takes your university card from your outstretched hand. Next, she asks to see your passport. You tell her you don’t have it with you, and that the man at the bank’s central office told you it wasn’t necessary. Maalesef she says. She needs to see the actual passport or she can’t register your phone number and then issue you with a pin number. You tell her you know the number of your passport, you can give it to her. Maalesef she says with a sigh. You tell her foreigners can’t be issued with a residence permit unless someone in a government department somewhere has seen their passport. You ask her why not just accept your ikamet as proof of who you are? After all, other banks and departments do, although admittedly not all of them all the time. The same goes for the government identity number, you can’t get that unless you have a residence permit and you can’t get that unless, well you know… but maalesef, and by now you have come to hate that word, unfortunately, without your passport they can’t güncellemek your phone number even though they never had it in the first place, you can’t get a pin number, so you can’t put money on your card and buy something, for example, lunch, which you should have eaten hours ago.

There is, fortunately, some good news in all this. It turns out you don’t have to come to this particular branch after all. As long as you have your passport, you can go to any branch, even the branch a minute’s walk away from your home, and get your pin number there.

The next morning I went to my local branch, with my passport and signed a second contract with the bank. Just to be sure I waited dört, four rather than üç, three, business days as advised, before I texted the bank again, for a şifre for my university entry and dining hall card. Every subsequent day I tried it was still no go. Without a pin number with which to load money on my card, I had to take my lunch to work and sit alone while my colleagues went off to the yemekhane to enjoy a three course meal for only a few lira. Six business days after signing the second contract with the bank, having shown them my pasaport and yet another futile phone call to the central office at merkez, I went to the local şube again. Once there I was told I should be able to get a pin number because all my documents had been received by the other branch, the one a long hot walk down a hill, round a corner and so on. I yet again told the teller that I still couldn’t get a pin number because the bank needed to güncellemek my phone number, although I still failed to understand how they could update information they didn’t have.

We both bit our lips and issued our individual language versions of the sound ‘hmmm’ while the teller fiddled with the computer keys. Suddenly she said “Oh, they haven’t recorded your phone number”, and asked me for it. Then she did some more mysterious things with the computer and printed out a form for me to sign. When I looked at it I saw it simply asked if I was me, myself, and if the phone number that I’d just told her was mine, was actually mine. I thought it was interesting that they needed my passport to allow her to ask me these questions, given that my passport doesn’t actually include my phone number so how does she check it? Experience tells me, this being Turkey, there is bound to be some logic behind all this, somewhere. I think. After I checked the number was correct and signed where directed, she scanned the sheet, sent an email somewhere and then went out the back to consult with the manager. I watched anxiously through the frosted glass as they talked but she quickly came back out and told me to yine, send the text requesting a pin number one more time.

I did so and quickly received a mesaj, a different one this time. At this point my Turkish failed me and I couldn’t understand it. I held out my phone to her and she quickly read it before telling me I was all set. “Gerçekten mi?” I asked. Could I really put money on my card now and go and eat at the personnel dining hall? Kesinlikle, she replied, I could even go outside right away and use the ATM to yatırmak some money but I declined. Even though she was absolutely certain it would work, I felt it was too much to expect I could get my pin number AND deposit some money in the account on the same day.

Finally getting my pin number left me unsure as to whether I should laugh or cry so I just slunk out of the branch, slightly stunned. I really thought I would have to bring lunch from home everyday for the next semester or two, while I waited for the problem to be sorted out.

Now, I wonder if I can sort out the problem I’m having with my cable television company…

“How to Improve Your Turkish” was originally published in Exploring Turkish Landscapes: Crossing Inner Boundaries in 2014.