Le Franco Phoney

Let’s start with the dumb. This letter from EDF arrived in a letterbox in Annecy last week. You can see from the date circled at the top (click on the letter for a larger image) that the letter was printed a month earlier. This seems to be standard practice with utility letters: it’s as if companies print out a huge pile of letters, then get someone to stuff one per day or something. Anyway, three weeks after the date, the letter arrived.

Now, three weeks seems like quite a long time when there’s only fifty-two of them in a year. But check out the other circled date. Yes, that’s December 2007 — almost a year ago. What’s the significance? Well, this is the date that the recipient requested a new service. This letter confirms the request, but then requests that the recipient call the number again to confirm once more — more than ten months after the request was made!

I know this is France and paperwork is relaxed, but tenants have come and gone in less time. And what makes the letter even more unbelievable is that it urges the reader to speed up the process two times. Great, so if your new service still isn’t working almost a year later, call this number and maybe you’ll get it after a further six months because you get to talk to the person who stuffs one letter per day between taking calls on missing letters and delayed services. Just so you know, the service still remains unused by the recipient.

On the other hand, the French postal system comes up trumps. What it lacks in speed it makes up for in service. A friend of mine received this postcard. As you can see, I haven’t had to blur out the address: it was simply addressed to my friend, with her surname spelt incorrectly, in La Clusaz. The postcode is wrong (that’s the sender’s postcode in Thônes, down the road), and no effort was made to describe the address. In the whole of La Clusaz, the post office tracked down the right person, with nothing more than her first name to go by, and delivered the postcard.

This certainly counteracts their placement of a large parcel for me in my letterbox. They wedged it in from the side that their key works in, but on my smaller, framed side, I had no way of getting the parcel out. For almost a week, it was wedged in despite the explanatory note on the letterbox. Each day, I’d fish out the new letters from around the wedged box until finally the postie saw the note and knocked on my door with parcel in hand, apologies and an embarrassed smile.

But these things are not so rare. As I type, I have a router ready to be installed, but the letter with my login details has never arrived. An insurance company who demanded I pay my renewal even though I had followed all legal routes to cancel my insurance still send letters telling me that, as a member, I can vote for their board members or something. I did quite like my water bill for 48c (if only they were all like that!), and I’m still waiting for an electrician to arrive, who promised in a letter to be here in October. We’re all, of course, only human, and French utility services certainly show their human side.

Last week, I ended an eleven-day road trip that took me through central France and onto the West coast to visit friends, followed by a quick drive back to La Clusaz. Some of the places were amazing, including the giant underground cave involving a boat ride on an underground lake to get there; ancient caveman paintings; camping metres away from Europe’s largest sand dune; and limestone rock, carved to create entire villages on cliff-faces. I’ll write in more detail about them just as soon as I’ve sorted out my French car insurance which is a whole separate story in itself.

Basically, if you change insurers, you have to give your existing insurer notice through a signed letter two months before you want your contract with them to ends. I still haven’t figured out if this is only possible when the contract is due to end or not, as I was using the alternative way of ending a contract: you have a twenty-day window when your contract is due to expire but you still have to write to them via certified mail to change insurers. Now, my old insurer has written to me to tell me that I can’t change insurers because I didn’t write in the specified twenty-day gap. However, my new insurer says I can because the date on the envelope is stamped as sent on the 20th July, whereas my old insurer tells me I needed to write within twenty days of the 9th of July (the date d’édition de l’avis d’échéance - the date of expiry). This in itself makes no sense as my insurance was set to run out on the 31st August. I’m hoping that the new insurer is correct in that the twenty days commences from the date stamped on the envelope, as I did change insurance during this period. Either way, I’ll be having a fun morning of speaking French and not understanding the responses. Actually, that’s presuming any of the insurance agencies are open: I heard they’re closed on Monday mornings.

Below is a map with the places we stayed in during each night of the road trip (we went anticlockwise). I’ll be adding photos and stories to it in the coming days. And maybe some photos from the Annecy Fete du Lac fireworks display on Saturday night (it included love-heart-shaped fireworks…awwww).