I was reading Sam de Bretagne’s blog on Sunday. There was a comment by a French person about how to deal with the Préfecture, Securité Sociale, or any other kind of bureaucracy with fonctionairres. They all have tickets dispensing numbers. He advises you to take about 10 numbers. Take a seat and watch the different fonctionairres. Identify which ones seem to be the nicest ones. When your first number comes up if it is not with a nice one just don’t go up to the counter. Keep repeating this until your next number is called by a nice person. Then go up to the counter and conduct your business. I’m going to try this right away and let you know how it goes.
Popularity: 10% [?]
LOL.
I’ve never seen anybody doing this, but that you mention it, I understand better why sometimes nobody will answer when some numbers come up.
Good luck with that though, and tell us how it went.
I’ll bet it works.
Oh please tell us how it goes.
Why didn’t I ever think of any tricks like this? It makes perfect sense!
Once in the Prefecture’s, I took two tickets by mistake and when a lady who had been there longer than me with 5 children was flummoxed because I was going ahead of her, I gave her one of the tickets. She was so appreciative as she hadn’t known about that queuing strategy.
Meilleurs voeux!!
In our préfecture there’s only one person who handles the cartes de séjour anyway…
And besides, we don’t have to go the préfecture for that, it’s all done through the mail and the cards are sent to our little town hall, where we go to pick them up from the people who know us.
All of our sécu stuff was done through the mail, too.
Well luckily I don’t think I need to go soon, but you never know. Tomorrow I just might receive in the mail a request for my justificatif de domicile and a RIB.
When we did something recently for our car there were many numbers ahead of us and it seemed to go quickly. I bet there were many people pulling this trick. There were like 80 numbers ahead of us and we were seen in less than 30 minutes.
@Walt, I assume you know how lucky you are with this arrangement? I guess if you are missing something or they decide to demand something not on your list of required docs then it could be a hassle. By mail sounds good though.
Oh, yes, we know from reading other people’s accounts that we’re pretty lucky. Once, Ken’s photo wasn’t good and they just called and asked him to send in another one. They’re very nice here in the rural parts.
When we stayed our first 2 months in the Dordogne people were very nice. There they didn’t know much about dealing with froeigners if you were not British. I went to the Préfecture in Perigord, now a left city, and they were a little puzzled about what to do. They were nice but said they didn’t really know what to do for Americans, come back later. At least in the big cities they know how to deal with foreigners
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