Will-o'-the-wisp

I went to the bank to pay the car tax. Every other transaction is either direct debit or online banking but for this particular job the download-and-print-it-out-youself car tax rectangle has to be personally rubber stamped by a bank teller.

In Greece vehicle tax runs from 1st Jan until 31st Dec without variation and you can print off your personal paperwork from early December, but most people don't. Most people pay their car tax in person at the bank during the three working days between Christmas and New Year. Imagine! Every single vehicle in Greece.

The bank opens for business at 8am and I arrived a little after 10. The queuing system told me that the tellers were currently dealing with queue numbers in the fifties and I had picked number 86. The system also estimated my waiting time as 32 minutes and from this I deduced that not a lot of people had been hanging around at 8am waiting for the doors to open.

However, the queuing system cannot predict the future it can only extrapolate information from recent history and it appears that the customers with queue numbers between 55 and 85 had rather more complicated business than those who had arrived earlier.

I was finally at the front of the queue a little before midday and when I left, I took another number from the machine just to see, it was numer 145 and did not give me an estimated waiting time, presumably because the bank would close before then.

When I got home I found out that the rules have changed and it is no longer necessary to have the rubber stamp of a bank teller on your car tax rectangle, you can pay it online nowadays. I also found out that the car roadworthiness certificate amnesty for small islands without a testing centre has been reinstated. This means that we did not need to send the blue car to be tested and neither did we need to send the white car to be destroyed.

It is traditional for rules to change in the final two weeks of the year, but predicting which ones it will be is quite a gamble.