A recent discussion (not here) occurred where someone said they didn't have a clue as to their NI number without looking it up. I agreed entirely with that and was slightly surprised by a number of people saying of course they knew it, how can you not, you need it to do anything these days, etc etc.
I think I've used mine about twice in my adult life, each time hunting through papers stuffed away in cupboards to find an old payslip or some such.
Do you know yours as a matter of course, and if so, why? Or, like me, is it one of those many bits of info, like your NHS number (they are different, aren't they?), that sit un-noticed till you need it and then put away again to be forgotten?
I imagine you need it for self employment and tax form stuff perhaps, neither of which have passed my way?
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I could probably remember it if I tried, but I definitely still remember my mother's coop number which I had to chant to myself as a child in order not to forget it on my way to fetch an errand.
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Imprinted on my psyche just as my Army number is. Rarely, if ever, have to use it these days, but back in the day when employment was spasmodic and unpredictable it was handy.
Not wishing to drift the thread; but has anyone noticed how all the hoo-hah about poor old pensioners having to remember PIN numbers has quietened down? Those generations were used to having to remember numbers, unlike today's mollycoddled youth who have been conditioned to remember nothing because "it's all available on line".
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I can remember the registration number of quite a few of my dad's cars, I can clearly remember that of my first car but I'd struggle to be accurate about the numbers of any of my subsequent ones other than my current one which I shall undoubtedly also forget soon after it has gone. I had to enter my wife's car registration number on something the other week and really couldn't begin to remember it other than the year digits.
Last edited by: Runfer D'Hills on Tue 28 Oct 14 at 11:25
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Keep em, (16 Font) on an A4 sheet with my passwords.
p.s. Blu Tacked on the wall by my old desk top the coooter screen. :-)
I had to dig out my NI number etc for my online driving licence renewal.
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Who knows their CHI (NHS) number without looking it up?
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>> Who knows their CHI (NHS) number without looking it up?
>>
Me. Spent too many times in the system. Always shocks the staff when recited and some of them get grumpy cos I'm now ahead of the game.
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In Tom's test:
Eidetic Memory !
Wow very impressive! You have great photographic memory! You were able to denoting mental images with unusual vividness and detail to pass this quiz. You have some special talent and the CIA should hire you to be their #1 spy! Great job! Now remember to share this and see if your friends can do the same.
I used to know lots of peoples phone numbers but now that they are stored in the phone I no longer even know my wife's and kids.
National ins number starts YT but it's a blur after that.
But I can recall the random 8 letters which are my wireless access code.
NB Edit required because I couldn't remember who posted the test!! :-)
Last edited by: smokie on Tue 28 Oct 14 at 13:30
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It says the CIA should hire me as well. Their standards are obviously pretty low, I can't even remember who I did my caravan insurance with three weeks ago.
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Seems I'm a potential Felix Leiter too !
Quite worrying really.
;-)
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I got the eidetic memory result.
Thing is, when I went back and checked I had got at least two wrong, and perhaps 3.
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Don't beat yourself up too much. Maybe it just means you're not quite OO material but you could perhaps aspire being a Moneypenny or something.
;-)
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I got
Alzheimer Kicking in
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>> How do you know?
How do I know what?
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Actually you can get your NINO on line. Just fill in form CA5403
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I can't recall mine but I can remember my National Registration No. from war days. These were in the form Letters (registration area)/Number(of family in that area)/Number (in that family - father 1, mother 2, oldest offspring 3 etc.) As I found decades later, while living abroad, my NI number could be found from this by the authorities.
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I can envisage National registration returning. It would make a lot of sense if based on fingerprint-security measures. Make UKIP redundant overnight:)
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>> I can envisage National registration returning. It would make a lot of sense if based
>> on fingerprint-security measures. Make UKIP redundant overnight:)
The NI number is being adopted to fulfil that function. I've had to quote mine for driving license, passport (countersignature for a neighbour) and sorting out an issue with the new voter registration system.
While I understand the issues it's worrying that this happens without any obvious Parliamentary process. Not even a debate never mind proper authorising legislation.
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I think I could get most of my NI number, wouldn't have a clue about NHS number wouldn't know where to look don't think I've ever used it.
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To be honest, and with no exaggeration, if you were to ask me my phone number I would struggle mightily.
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>> To be honest, and with no exaggeration, if you were to ask me my phone
>> number I would struggle mightily.
>>
I've always had difficulty remembering numbers. I can usually remember my phone number if I take a run at it, but it is just as likely to be my work number - sometimes a bit of each.
I can remember FLE 3000 for small ads, and WHItehall 1212 of course.
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My wife has an almost photographic memory for numbers and strings. Telephone numbers, postcodes of dim distant long since contacted people. Obscure second cousins birthdays ( I genuinely sometimes forget my own birthday and I'm totally in the camp of not being able to remember my own phone numbers )
Ever since everything you need to remember can be stored on your phone I've managed not to remember any of it. Which irritates me.
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Not quite sure why I remember mine, but (unusually) I've had to use it twice in the last week.
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I have a thirty year old Filofax which has my NI number .all our bank details, DOBs...etc..
Can't be hacked, never leaves the house, costs nothing to run.. Easy to find as well.
Why have anything more..
NIs needed for OAPs to claim pension etc...
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I can rattle off my NI number, but I was tripped up a few years ago when the last letter (D) apparently changed to an A on some official documents.
I rang them up, and they said it didn't matter as the last letter is ignored. HMRC actually doesn't care if you miss it off.
It has since reverted to a D. Seems it can be A, B, C or D. They were added at issue to already unique numbers and used to indicate the quarter in which the physical NI cards with stamps on were to be sent in by employers.
The prefix letters are supposedly random, except for the ones that are geographic!
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Whilst I can remember my NI number (and lots of other numbers as well - reg numbers of old cars? Old postcodes? Phone numbers? Dates and mileages of car acquisitions - check all of them....!) - I wonder why you need a Unique Taxpayer Reference to use HMRC on line service - er isn't that what an NI number is.....????
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I ended up with the same Eidectic Memory result as Smokie in the test above.
I have an excellent (almost photographic ) memory for anything that I consider I need and want to memorise. Emphasis is on the want . I use tried and tested memory techniques which I discovered as a youngster and are similar to those used by the memory men you see remembering packs of cards on TV.
I am able to memorise with PIN numbers , phone numbers and screeds of prose or poetry ...... from 30 or 40 years ago eg:-
First workplace phone number CITY 2046......
First contract worked on the contract number was 10400......
NI number was never a priority so I know it begins YP but thats about it...
Last edited by: helicopter on Tue 28 Oct 14 at 14:06
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I couldn't run the test - too many scripts and things to unblock. I give up if a website doesn't work after one unblock of the main one. I'm not unblocking google analytics and thousand tracking sites.
But I wouldn't have remembered anything.
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What do you have running then? I have Adblocker and Ghostery blocking everything they can and the website still ran ok.
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Ghostery, Adblock plus (not the same author as Adblock) and noscript, all on Firefox, which kills most sites. So a judicious "allow temporarily" on one or two scripts is what I do. But often that means another four thousand scripts want to run, most of them not things I want. Also have an addin that prevents pictures being displayed switched on.
For the few sites I visit regularly and have allowed, everything then goes blisteringly fast, which is useful to me. I only want the meat of the text. It's like the late eighties on my machine.
If for some reason I don't care that day or simply must see the content without fiddle I run plain chrome or ie and then see the page in all its sluggish ad filled pop up glory.
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I have Ghostery and AdBlock Plus on Waterfox. It didn't block that quiz.
Must be your picture blocker.
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I think it was Noscript that blocked something.
From memory.
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>> Ghostery, Adblock plus (not the same author as Adblock) and noscript, all on Firefox, which
>> kills most sites.
Really not sure why you power the PC on to be honest. I mean that must be fraught with danger.
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>> Really not sure why you power the PC on to be honest. I mean that
>> must be fraught with danger.
>>
Oh, and Cookie Monster too of course. Session cookies only and then only if I absolutely must.
Last edited by: Crankcase on Wed 29 Oct 14 at 07:53
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How did you get the internet to work properly? I tried loading some of that type of software, made it near unuseable. Various parts of pages missing, functionality reduced, lots of little blue boxes with question marks in them. I had delete them all to use the internet again.
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Too much for me.
What are you trying to avoid? And does it work?
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>> Too much for me.
>>
>> What are you trying to avoid? And does it work?
>>
Well, depends on what you mean by functionality. Here's an example. With all that stuff blocking, if I go to the Daily Mail website, what do I see?
No pictures. A headline in large text. The paragraph underneath with the article. And that's it. It loads pretty well instantly. I can read the article which is all I want to do.
As an experiment, let's now turn all the stuff off. What do I now get? Pictures, pretty layout, oh look, a ribbon bar at the top telling me the temperature and time, some links to sections like fashion, a login button, an advert for weightwatchers, a Daily Mail logo, a cookie policy logo, a facebook "like" button, a twitter follow button, a pinterest button, many many many pictures of celebrities, some comments at the bottom I don't want to read in this case, some info about how many people have shared the story, and a ten second loading time.
For the purposes of me reading this article, I need none of that, and the screen is cluttered to high heaven with just ...stuff. My way, it's a white page, headline, story, done deal.
Hmm. So what's actually embedded in the site? Well, I'm blocking:
Cookies:
7
Scripts:
Dailymail
Brightcove
Twitter
Facebook
Pinterest
Googletagservices
GoogleAnalytics
tynt
atdmt
crwdcntrl
criteo
googlesyndication
sonobi
revsci
taboola
scorecardresearch
Ghostery Trackers
Brightcove
Facebook Custom Audience
Lotame
Scorecard Research Beacon
Doubleclick
Facebook Connect
Audience Science
Criteo
Google Analytics
Google + Platform
Pinterest
Sonobi
Taboola
Twitter Button
All this is pretty benign of course - it's not malware, it's just anonymous tracking, who cares? Well, I just prefer a faster cleaner internet and if I don't get tracked at every click then that's not exactly a disadvantage either. So that's why I do what I do.
Of course, if there HAD been clickjacking attempts or XSS nasties, or some other driveby unpleasantness, I'd have been protected as well. It's my choice to do with reduced "functionality" and the slight pain and fiddle sometimes to get it to do what I want, and if it means I can't do the odd memory quiz easily then so be it.
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>> Seems it can be A, B, C or
>> D. They were added at issue to already unique numbers and used to indicate the
>> quarter in which the physical NI cards with stamps on were to be sent in
>> by employers.
>>
How interesting. So I could unilaterally change mine to P or Z, or perhaps even * or £, if there has to be a character in the space.
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Alzheimer Kicking in.
Spot on...:-)
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My ni number is in my head. I've always been able to remember numbers easily, including my HMRC staff number. Wish I could say the same for names.
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If you are good at remembering numbers here's something to get your teeth into. Can't remember pass the first four digits myself though. Think I will try to remember one more digit each day.
www.piday.org/million/
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Most of my clients remember theirs...I don't - I know its WE something....I've worked out that the letter are actually linked to the year of one's birth.
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>I know its WE something....I've worked out that the letter are actually linked to the year of one's birth.
Wellington at Eton?
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>> Most of my clients remember theirs...I don't - I know its WE something....I've worked out
>> that the letter are actually linked to the year of one's birth.
Ok mine starts YX - whats the year of my birth?
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>> >> Most of my clients remember theirs...I don't - I know its WE something....I've worked
>> out
>> >> that the letter are actually linked to the year of one's birth.
>>
>> Ok mine starts YX - whats the year of my birth?
>>
1954
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In theory you can calculate the exact DOB from the number. The final letter relates to which quarter of the calendar year you were born in.
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>> The final letter relates
>> to which quarter of the calendar year you were born in.
The suffix dates back to when contributions were recorded on cards which were returned annually, staggered throughout the tax year. “A†meant the card was to be returned in March; “B†in June; “C†in September and “D†in December. Although contribution cards are no longer used, the suffix has remained an integral part of the NINO."
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>> In theory you can calculate the exact DOB from the number. The final letter relates
>> to which quarter of the calendar year you were born in.
Not as far as I know, I looked into this a while back when they randomly changed my suffix for a while.
Temporary numbers used DOB for the numbers, but proper ones didn't, and sometimes sequential numbers were issued for siblings.
I think the link between prefixes and year of birth is a bit indirect - the issue date probably determined the prefix (whatever was being used at the time) but because they were issued at 15/16 or whatever they would roughly correlate to birth years too.
Mine is YR. 'Y' seems to relate to birth dates in the 1950s.
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I think that's about right but you can't work it out exactly from the NINO
From the NI website
"A prefix is chosen and then used until all the possible numbers have been allocated. Then another prefix is used but not necessarily the next one alphabetically. The characters D, F, I, Q, U and V are not used as either the first or second letter of a NINO prefix. The letter O is not used as the second letter of a prefix."
Thus the prefix will have a relationship to the year of issue but it not an exact one and could relate to multiple years or part of a year depending on how many NINOs are issued in any period.
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snipquote for the lazy person who couldn't be bothered himself!
>> 1954
Very clever NBD
Last edited by: VxFan on Wed 29 Oct 14 at 09:41
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>> >> Ok mine starts YX - whats the year of my birth?
>>
>> 1954
>>
or 1955
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My NI number is locked in my head and I can trip it out straight away.
Funnily enough, I needed it yesterday. My eldest daughter was round and needed it as she was putting me down as beneficiary in her 'death at work ' scheme. I rattled it straight off at her from my armchair. Do you know...she just wasn't ready with a pen or paper.....no forward planning, tchah. Had to tell her again ! Kids today !
I have a good memory for facts and trivia. I can remember some phone numbers from over 40 yrs ago which I haven't used since. They've even got letters in them like Cheshire Constabulary...OCH4 23101. or our own as a kid MOS 1511.
I have most important numbers like WiKi stuff on the inside of a kitchen wall cupboard door in felt tip...Not bank or web PINs though. Passwords are in a book hidden near the PC.
I can remember instantly the VINs of every car I've ever owned ! Impressed ??
Of course you are...but only by the outrageousness of the lie !
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This is as exciting as being a "rivit counter" on a classic car forum.
Starting with the chassis number, some old build records, and knowing whether it is a Type A or Type B lower trunion swivel bracket, it is possible to work out that the car was built at 10.30 am on 12 June 1965.
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On a Saturday morning? That's dedication.
What a day. Just look at the things that happened.
www.historyorb.com/date/1965/june/12
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>> I think I could get most of my NI number, wouldn't have a clue about
>> NHS number wouldn't know where to look don't think I've ever used it.
>>
Next time you get a prescription from the doctor you'll find it appears somewhere around your name and address, at least it does on mine......
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NI numbers still seem to be ID yardstick for government agencies, even though there are millions of 'spare' ones still floating about. This is an old news story, but I haven't heard anything to suggest that much has been done since...
tinyurl.com/lrzdxet
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I dealt with a guy in work - his NINO (as we call it !) was within a gnat's crotchet of mine, our dates of birth were very, very close...in fact within 24 hours. He was born at the opposite end of the country.
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N I Number - Runfer D'Hills
