France Tales

In France many people complain, with reason, about how difficult things can be when dealing with fonctionnaires, civil servants. I’ve had my share of difficulties but at the same time sometimes things I think will be difficult, turn out to be easy.

For example, when we bought our car we were living in Le Buisson de Cadouin, which is in the 24 department. We moved to Toulouse which is in the 31 department. Among all the things we had to do was change the carte grise, car registration, and get new license plates. We put this off for 2 months because we dreaded it.

It took us 3 trips to the Préfecture to get it right but that was entirely our fault. The first time we didn’t bring the original carte grise, the second time we didn’t bring our justificatif de domicile, proof of address, and the 3 rd time we had everything. I wish I could blame the French but I knew all the papers I needed each time but didn’t assemble them properly, it was my fault. For those of you who don’t know the French require a justificatif de domicile for everything imaginable, an ID card with an address is not good enough, we always have to show our lease.

The 3rd time we went, there was a huge line and there was less than an hour before they closed. We took a number from the machine and groaned when we saw that 53 people were ahead of us. We decided to leave and walk around the neighborhood for about 30 minutes and come back. Maybe there would be fewer people.

30 minutes later we returned. Now there were only about 30 numbers ahead of us but as we entered someone was leaving. They had gotten sick of waiting and they gave us their number, now only 13 numbers were ahead of us. And, in atypical French fashion, there was an announcement that the Préfecure would remain open untill all the people in the waiting area were seen. Dorothy, are we in France still?

As unbelieveable as that sounds, something even more unbelievable happened. Every single window that could see people opened and a fonctionairre appeared at each window. Within about 5 minutes the 11 people before us were seen and we were standing in front of someone who took our papers. She took everything with a smile and said wait a minute and about 27 seconds later she returned with our new carte grise with the new address printed on it. I don’t have to wait for it in the mail or worse yet, come back to the Préfecture every couple of weeks to see if it is ready yet. I get it right away? Really? Are you sure?

As we were leaving I said to Jean-Jacques but what about the license plate that says 24 on it. Don’t we need to change that? He turned to ask her and she said just take it to any service center to change it. Ahhh, there was the catch we thought.

As we went home we were cursing ourselves for not asking exactly where these service centers were, what their hours were, and how much it cost (because at this point it was free to change address, and nothing in France is free) we walked by a car repair place 1 block from our house. I said ask them where to go and Jean-Jacques did and they do exactly that service. We had the new carte grise in our hands so they took our info and 25€ and said come back tomorrow to get your new plate installed. We stood there blinking like deer in headlights.

Could you repeat that? You said come back tomorrow? With no appointment? You will install the license plate? Tomorrow it will all be over with? There is not an extra charge for installing the plate? We heard correctly but still thought, well between today and tomorrow something else could come up that we hadn’t thought of.

Today Jean-Jacques was walking the dog, went by the place to verify he could bring it in then, he brought it in, the plate was installed, no new charges, and we were finished. A really cool ending to this story would be a picture of the license plate but our car is 7 stories down and across the street in our garage. 2 months of worry and it only took less than an hour of work to get it done. Even in the US it takes a lot longer than that to complete this process. What a nice surprise. This probably means that something i think will be easy to do will turn out to be incredibly difficult. My optimism is contagious isn’t it?