Census

[enismirdal]

I STILL haven't received a census form. Coming to the conclusion that they were cutting it a bit fine, and knowing from experience that my address tends not to feature in a lot of databases (new conversion from offices, about 1 year old, etc.; it makes online purchases a bit annoying because the web-form will run a search on my postcode, provide a list of addresses that aren't mine, and then I'll have to enter the thing manually), I figured it was high time I requested one to be sent to me, so I could do my civic/legal duty.

I found the web form for "request a census form because you haven't been sent one". It asked for my postcode and building number/name. I filled it in. It told me my address didn't exist. I growled at the computer and said, "It does exist. I know. I live there!" I tried again, this time with just the postcode. It threw up a list of around ~6 residences with that postcode. None of them were mine. None of them were anything remotely like mine! I muttered brown words and phoned up the census helpline.

After playing the touch-tone game, I got a nice helpful human being, and had her search; she also confirmed that my address existeth not in the central census database. So she made a new entry just for me, with my correct address. I am now having a census form sent out.

The boys upstairs are also not in the database, it appears. They'll have to sort themselves out. My suspicion, however, is that they won't bother.

I wonder if the government will even realise they exist if they don't receive or fill in a form... I wonder how many people do get missed that way.

(In other news, driving is improving. He filled in my record book again today, and all my driving aspects that he'd previously rated 2 ("under full supervision") have now moved up to 3 or even 3.5 ("prompted" and "prompted sometimes but more often than seldom", respectively). He's going to make me drive TO my lesson location in my lesson on Saturday. I am terrified, but it'll be at 8am so the roads should be quiet and it'll hopefully only take 10 minutes. And being a big girl, if I say, "I want to pull into a side-road and take a bread for a bit," I will make sure I do! I've been promised traffic lights, and more roundabouts, which is good as I need to start doing more challenging things. He confirmed what I already knew - that I'm going to take towards the longer end of a normal number of lessons to learn - but as I knew that already, it didn't come as a disappointing surprise.)

Comments

[trinity-gal.livejournal.com]

Do you still live in Greater London area where weird new developments pop out of nowhere?

But go you for sorting your postcode out :)

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

Nope. Out in Kent now - London's only an hour away, but it's a bit cheaper and not as fast-moving out here! But a lot of the upper floors of shops in the town centre here are being converted from offices/empty rooms into one and two bedroom flats, and my flat was one such example! (I think the landlord bought up the whole upper floors of the building and turned them into two flats, which are now both being rented out for what I suspect is a fairly good return on his investment!)

I am wondering how long it will take before the world in general works out my flat exists!

[eveiya.livejournal.com]

My census form came today, but there's been a lot of new housing built around the Stirling and Alloa areas in the last five years and these new developments always presented problems for us when I worked for the council. We knew the addresses existed because we had clients living there and social workers doing home visits to them, but no-one else seemed to. Maybe they've had time to do sone catching up in the last year or two while the house-building has tailed off a lot, but I wouldn't bet on it.

[numberland.livejournal.com]

It could be an interesting bias. I should phone and bother people ask lots of questions shortly.

Re driving - I think one of the most amusing things in my brief spell of learning before ill made that unsafe was a lesson which went approximately:

Driving Instructor: "Why are you not speeding up after the traffic lights?" (apparently my main issue was being too slow).
Me: "Because it's a 20mph zone."
DI: "Is it, I thought it was all 30mph!"
Me: *points at repeater sign*
DI: "Did you know about that before the lesson?" "No? Okay, I was going to teach you observation next lesson but I don't think I'm going to bother now".

It was an amusing. There are good reasons I would be good at that (being brought up as a very road aware cyclist and spending ages in cars learning road awareness, road signs etc on long journeys) but I was rather pleased. I think I got something like 147/150 on the observation test.

[cobalt-skye.livejournal.com]

I'm also struggling to get a census form. I suspect I'm suffering from the fact that lots of organisations (including the council) struggle to find my address. Ordered one at the end of last week, still no sign.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Your census story amuses me to no end - not out of Schadenfreude, but because it's so different from what you'd see here. See, there's a census coming up sometime this year - and already left-ish groups are handing out pamphlets along the lines of "How to escape the census" and the like. Because apparently the government is totally doing this census just to interfere with people's privacy and to spy on them and find out if anyone's illegally housing people who aren't registered. Uh-huh. So there's a lot of "OMG CENSUS DON'T WANT" going on. Germans love some paranoia!

Accordingly, the idea of someone actually requesting a census form, repeatedly, and actually going to some effort to get one, is quite exotic. Over here, people would probably go to some length to not only not get a form, but to live at an address apparently unknown to the central database. Utopia! XD

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

LOL! Some people do feel like that, admittedly. I just...don't have any particular worries that the government will use this data to do bad things to me. And being an egotist, I like talking about myself to anyone who'll listen, even if that's a data entry clerk processing the million-and-twenty-third form in an office somewhere!