There exists, as all residents of France know, a gnomic Gallic god who occasionally decides, for reasons unclear to mere mortals, that the time has come for you to be re-acquainted with the very singular charms of French bureaucracy.
This painful but doubtless improving experience can take many forms. You will be peacefully living your life — your last bruising bout with French officialdom no more than a distant memory — when a harmless-looking letter from the Centre de Gestion de la Caisse d’Allocations Familiales will land on your doormat.
You are soon plunged into a strange and terrifying netherworld. Clinging desperately to the limp scrap of your queue number as if it were your only hope of getting out alive, you must confront ranks of pale and impatient people waving impenetrable forms and demanding why you still have not provided an officially approved translation of your maternal grandmother’s birth certificate, or just when you were thinking of furnishing copies of your certificat K bis along with your last two déclarations trimestrielles aux services fiscaux. (I am not making any of this up.)
The letter can, of course, also come from the Centre Générale de Sécurité Sociale, the Service du Traitement des Demandes de Logement or, if the gnomic god is feeling particularly playful, the Union de Recouvrement des Cotisations de Sécurité Sociale et d’Allocations Familiales. Only one thing is quite sure: come it will.
Anyway. It was, as I’m sure you had guessed, my turn last week. The only consolation, when the letter stamped Direction Départementale du Travail, de l’Emploi et de la Formation Professionelle arrived, was that it was aimed only tangentially at me, concerning mainly the nice Polish woman who cleans and irons for us once a week and who, after nearly a decade as an illegal alien, has embarked on the administrative equivalent of one of those awesome obstacle courses for would-be SAS members.
She wants, as the French say in such circumstances, to regularise her situation.
Heaven alone knows what bureaucratic hoops Ewa has had to jump through. What I had to do was to go to a depressed and dingy outpost of the Ministère de l’Emploi et du Travail on the Boulevard de la Villette in northern Paris, take a number, wait two hours and 18 minutes, and then confront a pale and impatient woman waving an impenetrable form numbered TE 01, entitled Contrat de Travail pour Travailleur Etranger Non-Agricole.
Among other things, this required me to state my Numéro URSSAF and my Code APE — neither of which I had. (I’m not even sure I know what they are.) I also had to promise to pay the Office des Migrations Internationales de la République â,¬180 (£126), unless the applicant came from Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Lebanon, Gabon or Togo, in which case it was â,¬160.
The pale and impatient person behind the counter also told me I should complete another two forms and fill out in duplicate two exhaustive questionnaires concerning the Couverture Sociale et Logement de Travailleurs Etrangers.
Then she asked me if Ewa was already living in France. For about a decade, I replied. ”Ah bon,” she said. ”In that case, you have to go to 127, Quai de Jemappes. Sixth floor, room 123, Bureau des Regularisations et de Changements de Statut. They’re open on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons.” It was, needless to say, Tuesday afternoon.
There is, reportedly, an interministerial mission busy streamlining French bureaucratic procedures. An Orientation Committee for the Simplification of Administrative Language has also been hard at work since 1998. Together, they supposedly aim to do away with the authoritarian, inquisitorial, supercilious image of French officialdom, under the promising motto: ”It is not up to the public to adapt to bureaucrats, but us to adapt to the public.”
All I can say is that they have yet to slay the gnomic Gallic god. – Guardian Unlimited Â