Treading on Eggshells - France - page 121

Préfecture. We decided to take a break from the whole thing, a week or so just to lick our
wounds and take stock. If we needed to go back to the Préfecture then we needed to make
sure that we had everything necessary or it would be a bloodbath. Our first stop however was
the Mairie to get an attéstation d'immatriculation ( carte grise application form) and une liste
des pieces à joindre (a list of accompanying documents). Apart from having a rank inability
to say attéstation d'immatriculation , even without a boozy lunch, I managed to complete this
task and the list of accompanying documents was a bonus too and so we set off for the Sous-
Préfecture, if not exactly optimistically, then at least with closure in mind.
We arrived at the Préfecture's office, laden with files of documents, took our ticket from the
machine and waited to be called. The waiting room was a desultory place, full of people who
had lost all hope as they - French people who had bought French cars in France - are forced
to go through the same hoops of fire that we are. French Bureaucracy isn't singling us out
because we're foreigners or trying to do something unusual, it does this to EVERYONE. It
isn't discriminating, it hates EVERYONE.
We were called in to the office where there were two fonctionnaires waiting behind desks;
one, the man, was insulting the 'customer' who had just left. They were angry people, one
could sense it, and obviously the more cases they can dismiss without success the more sat-
isfaction they got out of their job. We were lambs to the slaughter. The first ten minutes was
spent trying to explain that we lived in France and that we weren't actually here just to get the
UK address switched to a French one, because you know, that would be fun wouldn't it? We'd
all do that for kicks and giggles right? Once that was established, and they had been incred-
ibly rude during what was their error, we worked through our list of supporting documents
and then the alarms went off, the portcullis came down and the smiles, thin, wan cold smiles,
spread across their faces.
'You don't have an electricity bill here?' the fonctionnaire said, for the first time catching our
eye.
'No,' Natalie said, trying to keep her temper, 'the list here says a water bill will do.' He picked
up the list, took a red pen, put a line through the bit saying water bill and handed back the
list.
'Electricity bill,' he said menacingly.
'Next!' shouted his colleague.
'You know what you're doing wrong?' said Serge, a French friend from Natalie's agence im-
mobilière over lunch that day. 'You are being too French. You speak the language and so they
can talk to you how they want.' We all nodded sagely. 'What you need to do is play the dumb
foreigner, not speak the language, make them do the work; cause them problems they are not
used to.'
I continued to nod sagely and only then did I notice that Natalie and Serge were both looking
at me, the dumb foreigner. Normally I spend my time wishing the weekends away, but the