No Penis. Period. (HELP!)

I’m a very proud person, and refuse to ask for help until the very last moment (usually when it’s too late!), so I insisted that I would do EVERYTHING myself. However, the tiredness has been really building up, so I’ve been making really stupid embarrassing mistakes.

The Spanish language is specifically designed to trip up the unwitting foreigner, so ofcourse it stands to reason that the word for chicken (“pollo”) is very similar in pronunciation to the word for penis (“poya”). It is a fatal error to walk up to a butcher’s counter thinking “Don’t say penis. Don’t say penis. Don’t say penis”. You will ask for penis when you mean to ask for chicken, and what’s worse, you will walk away from the counter empty-handed.

Also, if you don’t know how to ask for a monthly metro pass, you will also inadvertently ask some poor bugger for a period of a more menstrual variety. But no one will laugh this time as you are holding up the ticket buying queue with your tomfoolery.

If I was the kind of person who depended on the help of others, I think my life, and those of the people I come into contact with, would become very boring. However, I finally plucked up the courage to ask Ana for a bit of help with my NIE. She called the number I had been given while I watched, but told me that there was an answer phone message saying I had to “sign in online”. This didn’t make much sense as you need the NIE number to actually sign in. I know the system is completely messed up, but I also know that this is the phone number that other people have used to make their appointment. Could Ana just be fobbing me off? No, I'm just paranoid. She has no reason to do that, surely...

But seriously, what the fuck am I going to do? You can’t get a bank account without a NIE, and you can’t get paid without a bank account. This situation is getting dire now!