Sud de France 4.2: Twisting the world away.

It was announced today--23 November--that Ireland is accepting the European Union’s bailout plan. That's like getting offered a ride home from the drunk on the next bar stool; probably neither of you will get home safely. The problem only gets worse when you consider that among the other drunks who are offering you rides there's Greece, Italy, Spain, England and Portugal. 

In part the problem is the European  bureaucracy. In my blog posts I’ve poked fun at the French bureaucracy and the European Union--which is like the French model on steroids. These structures have done little to contain the bank crisis but a lot to frustrate and anger the populations of Europe. In response to these vast regulatory organizations individuals figure ways around the rules, the taxes and the letter of the law. I'm learning the game of getting around roadblocks but I'm still not comfortable with it.   

Which brings me to today’s new French word; “tordu.” This translates roughly as twisted and in many ways it sums up the situation here in France and around Europe.

A legume tordu

I learned this word and experienced it first hand when my wife and I went looking for a car. We’d found one we liked, negotiated a price and sat down with the dealer ready to write a check. It made him very happy. We gave him our passports, our RIB (proof of a bank account) and credit card info. He began to do the paperwork and after a few minutes asked us if we had a “facture” that is a utility receipt, usually one from the electric company. In France it’s proof of your address. 

This is tordu number one, we don’t have any utility bills because we are renting a place and the owners pay those expenses. We explained this and the dealer who made an unhappy face and said the law requires a facture to get the license plates. When I asked him why the address on our bank checks wasn’t sufficient he said with a sneer,

“Tout est tordu en France.” In France everything is twisted. 

See that’s the twisted part because to get the bank account open we had to get the bank a facture. Since we had been in France for only ten days and had nothing with an address on it, we got our kids to send us the closing electric bill from former home in America. Despite it being a closing bill for a place we no longer lived in or owned it worked for the bank. 

So a facture from a place 4500 miles away was put in our bank dossier or file probably never to be seen again. We got our checks although they had our US address on them. But that was easy to change because we now had an account we got our French address on the checks just by asking

Following this? Even though it took a facture to get our bank account open, we still needed another facture for the car because the account isn’t a facture, a receipt, but an account. Now that’s tordu! Zut alors!

It is kind of like the line in the movie, “Jake, you can’t do anything its Chinatown.” Don’t to try to understand it, it is just the way it is.

Since we couldn’t use the U.S. electric bill again (it was too old by now) my challenge was to figure how to get a facture. This called for thinking outside the box and I arrived at a solution that any Frenchman would be proud of. We had gotten a promotional letter from the bank thanking us for opening our account and asking how much money we wanted. I’d thrown it into the garbage but now made a mad dash to retrieve it.

The trick was to turn the promotional letter into a facture and to do this I went to the local phone store to get the Blackberry phone I had been thinking of buying. When you get a phone you sign up for a two year contract and they give you a receipt with your address on it.  

At the store I chose a phone and gave the clerk our passports and the bank letter. I watched as he copied the address from the letter. Then he made a photocopy of the letter for his store dossier and gave me the phone and receipt—a facture! We went immediately to the dealer who took the ten minute old facture and made a photocopy of it for his dossier, saying that the car would be ready in a few days.

That’s the real lesson. In response to all tordu culture the place is full of phony dossiers. Big paper files for everything that just end up sitting in some huge Kafkaesque warehouse somewhere gathering dust. None of the information gathered in the dossiers is ever connected to another dossier. 

I think this happens because no one in Europe wants to be the decider; to take responsibility for decisions. Instead they generate piles of PAPER with which they cover their asses. The byzantine nature of the law forces everyone to collect paper pretending it has some purpose. It’s a Dickensian world of thick files, fountain pen bearing clerks and photocopies of photocopies. Sadly Europe is at a tipping point. If governments can’t make their systems transparent enough for people to trust them and use them how will the compete in the global market place.

Devices like my Blackberry are the tools of the future. The big, thick paper dossier is a dinosaur, out of the information dark ages, a sad reminder of the rigidity of the old world.  

Bureaucracy at work is best illustrated by this EU poster. The area on the globe that is highlighted is the Balkans, Russia, Ukraine and the Middle East. Most of the EU itself is stuck in the dark behind and under the flag.