Well, That Was Unlikely...

...I thought, as I sat in the tax office, processing forms. Forms that had been sent to the Bristol office, shuffled, and split into three piles, the smallest of which of which had been sent here, where they could have been pulled out and worked by any of the eight people on the movements team.

The P46 is a form people fill in when they start a new job without providing their new employer with parts two and three of their P45. Employment agencies use them all the time.

I have schooled myself, as I'm not supposed to be taking that much interest in the myriads of deeply personal information that passes in front of my eyes on a daily basis, to just see words. I type the national insurance number into the computer, and check that the words that flag up are the same on the computer record as on the form. If they are, I carry on and process the words and numbers that correspond to the actual person, who I don't particularly want to know about. If not, I investigate further.

Thus, when the address words didn't match up, I investigated further.

That address looks familiar, I thought.

Ah, yes. It's mine.

The name on the P46?

Miss E. A. C. Millington

Small world, people.

Needless to say, I didn't work it - we don't work forms of people we know in order to preserve their confidentiality - but given the actual number of variables, the chances of me running into that form were literally thousands to one. Psychic link for the win...