I went to buy bananas in a grocery store behind the corner from my beloved’s apartment. There was a long line in front of me, but it kept moving rather quickly. I was not far from the cashiers when the line stopped in its tracks. Something was going on, and I started paying attention. A woman in front of the line was giving a long series of numbers to the woman behind the counter, who was entering them into the cash register. As witnessed by a series of high-pitched beeps, the whole lot was being rejected time and again. “Our company’s numbers never start with a zero,” the woman behind the counter complained at last. “Oh,” the woman in front of the line was taken aback, “I was giving you my Personal Identity Number!” As it turned out, the woman in front of the line did not have the company card, which gives loyal costumers of the grocery-store chain a small discount on all purchases. Introduced only recently in Croatia, the Personal Identity Number pops up all over the place, but it is not required in grocery stores. Not yet, that is. Croatia in a nutshell.