Le Franco Phoney

Look, I know the French have a bit of a reputation for lots of red tape and striking, but this is ridiculous. Three attempts at progress yesterday failed at every mark.

Attempt 1: Carte Vitale

I applied for my French healthcare card back in March 2009 (and wrote about the nightmare here). I’ve  paid €3,500 for the card’s benefits in 2009, but have yet to receive the card. Calls in July to three separate places (diverted to a new place each time) led to someone saying I should have received a temporary paper card, and a week later, it did show up. It isn’t all that useful and I still have to pay full price for most things. So, another call yesterday — and a referral first to a number for a whole separate area of France, then a referral back to the original number, which the guy actually got wrong anyway —finally led to a woman saying that yes, sometimes it takes years and she really had no way of telling when it will arrive. Meanwhile, I’ve received a 2010 payment request of €4,650! So I’m paying for something I don’t even have, and I’m paying way more than I would claim back in a year anyway. Great. Thank you so much, healthcare people in France. I wonder how much extra stress your ‘healthcare’ causes.

Attempt 2: fuel for heating

At the start of December, a man delivered heating fuel. I have a 600 litre tank, plus two 200 litre barrel reserves. He couldn’t get his fuel filler hose into the 600 litre tank, so he filled the two smaller reserves, said the whole setup was dangerous and refused to come back to fill up again. He said he’d get someone from the company to come and have a look at it. At the start of January, with the fuel line going down quickly, a call to the company was short and sweet with the woman saying that no worries, someone would be having a look very soon. Amazingly, I received a call from them yesterday! They called me. They called me. I explained nobody had been to check out the danger and then she asked me to explain the whole thing. I did so, then she said thanks and goodbye. Before she could hang up, I asked her if that meant somebody would be visiting and she said no, it wasn’t up to their company: they just deliver the fuel. I explained that in January, the person on the other end of the phone said someone from the same company would come to check and she agreed that someone would come. I don’t know if I was more confused with her inability to stick to one story or if she just didn’t have a clue what I was saying in French. She’s going to speak to the fuel filler guy and call back today, she said…

Attempt 3: car registration change of address

Now, you might think that this would be easy, but it is not. Rewind: when I finally sent the letter from my old landlord (which he gave me two months later) to say I had left his place, my home/car insurance company asked for proof that I had also changed my address on my car registration (carte grise in French). I hadn’t even thought of that, so I went down yesterday afternoon, prepared after reading what I needed to take with me, to visit the prefecture in Annecy. I had ID, a bill in my name, my old car registration, and the long change of address form that I had to fill out. I’d noticed on their website that they were closed the day before yesterday for some ‘exceptional’ reason, but the web site said nothing about yesterday or any other day in the future. I drove in the snow to Annecy, parked the car and walked in a near blizzard to get to the prefecture. When I got there, it was closed. There was a notice on the door saying that from September 2009, the office would only be open in the mornings. Their website did not mention this. How can their website not mention this? In addition, when I do get around to changing my address, I will have to pay for the privilege and attach new number plates to my car. I moved five minutes down the road from my old house. Is this not overkill?

What really bothers me is that the French tax office sent me a form ten days before Christmas demanding tax information before the end of the year. They expect such a quick response from me, yet here I am still waiting for any and every administrative function to actually function in my favour. I don’t even know if they received anything from my accountant: I couldn’t get hold of him on the phone, so I e-mailed him an explanation and sent the forms to him, hoping he’d do something. He’s on holiday until next week, but that’s okay: the tax office haven’t sent anything else, so I’m wondering if perhaps it’s just a standard of communication in France, and in actual fact, they mean they want my tax details before the end of 2010. I’ll keep you posted.

Paperwork in France seems to be endless, and although I’ve never really felt homesick for Australia in my ten years of living overseas, I find myself sometimes wishing I lived there just for the simplicity of living. Don’t get me wrong: I love the French lifestyle of long lunch breaks, shops closed on Sundays, and local bakeries still flourishing despite cheaper supermarket alternatives. However, I don’t get to live this lifestyle because my days are bogged down with filling out forms, chasing up correspondence and trying to get to the post office during their out-of-season reduced opening times to post the piles of paperwork.

Yesterday, for example, I received two letters. The first was a newsletter from my home insurance company. This would be great if I still used them for home insurance, but I don’t. The same thing happened with my car insurance last year, where I was advised that I had the right to vote for the members of the board or something because I was ‘a valued client’. Okay, this sort of mail isn’t really a problem, but it does mean I’m wasting my time opening crud instead of dealing with the real mail.

My second letter was indeed real mail. It was a bill for more than €3,000! What on earth could the bill be for? Apparently, it’s the cost of having a healthcare card for six months, and you must pay in advance of course. The health care card is the infamous Carte Vitale, which I applied for (and wrote about months ago). I still don’t have it. So, they’re trying to bill me for a service that I’m already paying for on the spot. They’re estimating how much it should cost, and if I’ve overpaid, I’ll see my money two years on.

In fact, while we’re talking about ridiculous billing, my landlord also qualifies. For three years, I’ve been a good tenant and we have a great relationship. He then decided to send me a bill for rent increases backdated for the past two years. Not just one increase, but two, as he is legally allowed, apparently, to up the rent by a government-specified amount each year. He forgot, and now he wants the money. So, whether I think the apartment is worth the upped rent or not, I have to pay it. How do I know this? Phone calls to various institutions to ask about my rights.

So, back to the Carte Vitale. Yesterday, I called the place who sent me the bill, but to ‘improve customer service’, they’re only open three days per week. Surely they could improve customer service by adding more people to their call centre to answer the phones while they’re off improving customer service. I called another number and they told me to call the first number. They’re open today, so I called them back, and after the usual long wait with client-calming hold music, a woman finally told me to call the company who had told me to call her. She at least gave me a different number. The number worked, and another woman told me that the Carte Vitale would take some time and that it was impossible to say how long. She also said I should have received a form for the Carte Vitale before the bill. She can’t send me one (it’s not done by the company she works for), so I have to wait until I get it, but she can send me a temporary Carte Vitale which I can use in the same way. This is apparently not an automatic thing.

Now, I’d really love to go outside and enjoy this beautiful sunny day, but I’ll be spending it checking my mail, writing letters and making phone calls instead. Oh, and looking for extra work to pay all these bills.

Today, I headed down to Annecy, motivated to sort out my health care card, called a Carte Vitale, which means I will finally stop paying for all my own medical expenses and let my taxes work for me instead. French paperwork is renowned for being tedious and lengthy: I gave up importing my favourite car (edition not produced in France) from England because the paperwork was so horrendous, and indeed confusing.

So, I left La Clusaz armed with birth certificates, passports, and as much other paperwork I could find to prevent any hold-ups. I arrived in Annecy and parked in a central car park called Place des Romains and walked to the CPAM office I had been instructed to go to. After the usual “take a number” system, the staff member who looked into my request explained she could not process a health care card for me: I needed to go to the office on the other side of Annecy and request one there. She wrote down the street and office name for me and off I went. Somehow, I found the office despite the name being completely different to the one she has written down. I explained my request to the receptionist, but she got stuck when she discovered I had no social security number.

After some phone calls and people shuffling by to check out my paperwork and tut that I had no social security number, the woman instructed me to go to the office in Avenue des Isles—the road beside the Place des Romains car park, where I had started the day. I couldn’t be annoyed at the wasted hours because I had expected this to happen. My days are much less stressful when I’ve set my expectations low, and if there’s any French paperwork to be done, I’ve discovered it’s best to set my expectations as low as they will go.

The good news when I arrived at the third office was that it was the right office and I was the first in the queue. The bad news was, when I eventually did get to see someone after a long wait in a corridor with three seats which were soon in demand as the corridor filled with others, that the woman helping me could not find my details on the computer system in front of her. More tutting; more French I didn’t quite get; more confusion on both sides of the table. She scribbled some notes on a piece of paper and sent me on my way without looking at any of my papers. No Carte Vitale, and no receipt that I had been there. I have to wait for something to arrive in the mail in order to apply for a Carte Vitale, and I’m guessing that I will be required to return to Annecy and relive today’s events all over again. I’ve included a picture of the Carte Vitale in case I never actually get to see my own.

I really should have just gone skiing instead.

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).