Having covered a rather positive aspect of French society
last week, this week I am exploring some areas France could well do with
improving. France is a paradoxical place. It envisaged and constructed one of
the best and fastest train systems on the planet, and yet many restaurants and
public places still don’t have seats on their toilets. They have exceptional,
intelligent cuisine, but dog poo lines nearly every street. In France you learn
to walk with your eyes fixed on the pavement in order to avoid the
all-too-frequent dollops of “merde” (which is a shame considering there is
often much to see above head height). Why restaurant owners cannot invest in
toilet seats and the state make fouling illegal is beyond me. France has the
amazing ability to excel in certain more difficult areas and fail dramatically
at the more simple things.
A friend recently recounted to me a particularly annoying
episode in which she went to see her University tutor. The tutor is available
for consultations on Wednesdays, but it is not possible to book a time, you
just have to go and wait to be seen. Democratic perhaps, but completely
senseless. My friend arrived at 9am only to wait until 6pm to see her tutor.
This system wastes people’s valuable time and yet it could so easily be
dramatically improved. Shops persistently fall down in a similar way. I was
recently in a book shop where there were four members of staff behind the
counter. There was a long line of customers waiting to purchase something and
yet only one of those personnel was managing to serve someone, and painfully
slowly at that. I realise impatience is an ugly quality but please could
someone serve me before I boil over with frustration? This same book shop has
five floors. If you go in and ask if they have a specific book, staff cannot
just check on any computer, but the customer has to climb several storeys to
the particular section of the shop and ask there. Surely with advanced technology they could change this so that you
can check on any level? Why don’t they make it easy for customers?
Let’s take public transport as another example. When you
arrive in a city by train, you would think there’d be some information about
local transport available in the train station. No. How about the tourist
office? No again. You have to go to the office that specifically deals with
transport. Perhaps it’s sensible to keep all of the information about transport
in one place, but surely the most obvious places for tourists to look for this
information would be the tourist information office or the ‘gare’. Couldn’t the
transport office make a few extra copies of its timetables for the Tourist
Info? Surely tourists as well as locals are going to want to find about how to
get around town, and surely it is in the local authority’s interest to make
things as easy as possible for tourists?
In my beautiful French city there is a Médiathèque, i.e. a
library with computer and media facilities. Now, forgive me if I assumed too
much, but one might think that a place with such a name would be well equipped
in the IT department. However, their computers are so old they don’t even have
USB portals, there is no wifi, printing is a ridiculously long process, and
photocopying? You’d be so lucky. France is obviously an outstanding country in
many ways, but it is oddly backward in others.
Beyond these odd and minor frustrating qualities, France
also happens to be “un pays d’administration”, that is, a country of
bureaucracy. Despite the delightful relaxing aspects that French culture brings
– sitting in lovely outdoor cafés, spending hours over a meal, the warm and
uplifting weather – it is often surprisingly difficult to live here. That is, the
day to day tasks that people have to carry out are often made unnecessarily
difficult. Take opening a bank account for example. You need a copy of
practically all official documents you own: passport, driver’s licence, birth
certificate, recent proof of address, your landlord’s proof of address and ID,
a payslip, passport photos, proof of student status... I realise some of these
formalities are similar in the UK, but for some reason, here, activities like
these take far too long and are the source of unnecessary, excess anguish.
After seven trips to the bank ensuring that you have given exactly the right documents,
your bank card will then be sent to your bank, and not to your house which would
be far more sensible. When you then try to do anything in the bank, you need to have your ID card, which for us
foreigners means your passport. Needless to say carrying around your passport
all day is not advisable, and if you offer your driving licence instead of your
passport it will not go down well. If you wish to close your account, or change
anything significant, it must be done at the branch where you opened your
account. This may seem reasonable at first thought, but if you consider how
much people move around these days, students in particular, it can cause great
problems. There seems no sensible reason why you can’t do these things in any
branch. I have one friend in mind who has been trying to obtain a new pincode
for 2 years to no avail because of the ridiculous bureaucracy involved. At one
point they said they couldn’t send it to her because her address was too long
to fit in the box on their computer system! Furthermore, because of the
difficulty of banking here, when you do go to the bank there is always a crowd,
and rarely an organised queue. Do we form one line or three lines if there are
three counters? Confusion prevails, English people get impatient, and the bank
staff never seem to take it upon themselves to make it clear to people how they
should wait in order for the person who arrived first to be served first.
Surely it’s not that difficult for someone to create a bit of order?
Setting up a mobile phone is another nightmare. In the UK,
you can literally set a phone contract up and running in 15 minutes. In France
you are lucky if it happens within a week. Again, you need what seems like a
ridiculous collection of documents in order to set up a contract – bank account
statement, bank card, proof of address, ID of the property owner, passport... .
In all but one particular phone shop, it will then take several days for the
sim card to be registered and activated. I do not understand why they need all
these documents and why it must take forever. Presumably if the network
operator receives their money each month and the customer receives their
texts/minutes/internet, then everyone will be happy? Surely your landlord’s ID
card is superfluous information? But for the French apparently it is not. It
has to be a painstakingly long process.
Processes with the French CAF (Caisses d’Allocations Familiales – living allowance), health system and
civil authorities can be similarly slow and baffling. Things take so long to
come into place that for foreigners living here on a short term basis it is
barely worth setting any of it up. I say some of this with reserved anger, as I
am fully aware of how nice it is that the French state wants to give people
money towards their housing and health costs. But most of these minor
issues I have ranted about could be resolved so very easily. Most of these
petty grievances are shared by many French people. Why, then, do things never
get changed? Perhaps France will forever be the country that contrasts stunning
landscapes and cities with poo, delicious cuisine with never-ending bank
queues, and a feisty protesting spirit with the need to let the things less
important on a large scale (but still very annoying when all added up!) go
amiss.
Until they do, I suppose I’ll just have to remain a grumpy
young lady.
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Grumpy Young Lady
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