Licensed to drive: the saga continues

Right as I am about to permanently leave France, the French bureaucracy has decided to give me one last gift of a humorous anecdote. Consider it the French state's contribution to this blog: it delays my having to come up with British-related humorous content.

You may recall my driver's license saga from a post on this blog back in April. If not, here is the link.

When I left you last time, I had been sent away to return with a high-school transcript proving that I was a resident of the State of Florida on an arbitrary date that I made up as being the date my first driving license was issued.

Fast forward a couple of months until sometime in June when I take yet another morning off work to go back to the "prefecture" with my transcript and five payslips proving I've been living in France for at least six months. The young lady looked through my documents and says "congratulations, you've been approved for a license but first you must go to a medical examination". She wanted to schedule me for an appointment in October, but I knew I'd have left by then so I come up with some story about how I'm going travelling for business for three months bla, bla, bla. Luckily, she had availability for Thursday the 4th of September (day before yesterday) early in the morning. She told me that as soon as I had the medical "ok" I could come straight back to her office and get my license.

On the 4th, I take the whole day off of work (mind you this was the day before my last day of work) so that I can go take care of this. I go in the morning to the medical office where I'm asked to strip down to my underwear and shoes and then walk into the doctors' office where there are various doctors and nurses of both genders hanging around. Quite intimidating. I get my medical certificate and hightail it back to the Prefecture to make the most of this day. As soon as I arrive at the driving license office I show the receptionist my medical certificate and he asks me : "why did you get a medical certificate? You don't need one of those." I tell him that I had been required to get one last time I was there and he looked puzzled. This was at 10:45 in the morning. He gives me a number and four hours pass before my number is called. In the meantime I strike up a conversation with a couple from Michigan who is there, like me, to exchange their license for a French one under reciprocity laws. It's their first visit. I tell them all my horror stories trying to convince them that they'll be sent home in search of their great-grandfather's death certificate. They seem all chipper and confident; and don't speak a word of French. I'm rubbing my palms together waiting for them to be fed to the sharks, but they get called before me, spend a few minutes at the counter, and walk off with a shiny new French driving license. As they leave, the guy gives me a thumbs up and says "I think they just don't like you here." A sensible conclusion!

But anyway, way past my lunchtime I finally get called to the desk. I see the man start preparing my license, putting it through the printer and attaching my photograph to it. As he's doing this he asks me for my passport. I give him my EU member state passport and he says "don't you have an American passport?" "Oh, no, here it comes!" thinks I. I explain that I do have one but not on me as I only brought the one that proves my legal right to work in France. He tells me that the reciprocity agreement only applies to citizens of the countries in question and he therefore cannot give me a license unless I prove that I am a US citizen. Mind you, at no point during any of my previous three visits did ANYBODY tell me that I had to be a US citizen nor did I ever show them, nor did they ever ask me to show them a US passport. I desperately dig through my documents trying to see what I can come up with. I find a Miami-Dade county voter's registration card. "Look!" I say "You can't vote in America if you aren't a citizen. It's even written in Haitian Creole which is almost like French so you can understand it!" "Sorry, only a passport will do."

At this point, I decide to do away with all the British stiff upper lip that I'd been working on developing and get a little South American on his ass. Roots, yo! My voice raises a few decibels and I start running through the whole sad saga from day one about how many visits I'd already made, how many hours I'd waited and how I didn't understand why nobody had bothered to inform me of this requirement. The man looked frightened. I thought he was about to press a button to call security. Instead he asks "Why are you yelling at me? You're leaving here with your license." "What? I am? So what's the problem, then?" "Oh, there is no problem I assure you, go to desk G and wait until you are called."

By now I'm convinced that this is all a ruse and that desk G is where the goon squad is going to come get me to eject me from the premises. But no, soon enough my name is called and I'm given this:





Success!! That phone call to Mr. Sakho really did pay off, I guess. Mind you, the document is so sloppy and amateurishly done (my details are filled in with a dot-matrix printer of the sort I haven't seen around since 1984) that I could easily have saved myself the trouble and made it at home with my ink jet. The most amusing part is that it states that this license was issued in substitution for Florida driver's license number XXX issued on the 29th of January, 1989. Yup, that's the date I made up off the top of my head.

Lessons to be learned from this:

1) The employees of the French DMV make up the rules as they go along. If you're refused the first time, come back again and speak to somebody else. The requirements will probably be completely different and you might just get lucky.

2) Based on the experience of the couple from Michigan: don't speak French. Ironically, and despite anything you may have heard, being a non-French speaker is actually an asset when dealing with French bureaucrats. I think they just get tired of having to deal with you so they just stamp you right through.

Just what I need: Driver's License Juju!

Our arrondissement, the 18th, is known to be one of the most ethnically diverse in Paris. This is one of the things Maki and I most enjoy about it. There are really all kinds of people around and lots of cheap, good ethnic food. A few weekends ago we went out for a meal at a Cote d’Ivoirian restaurant, where I had a fish soup that came with the fish scales, head, eyeballs and everything. Very Indiana Jones. “Rootsy”, as a Trinidadian friend of ours would say (this is my official favorite word of the month. I’m managing to sneak it into every other sentence).

Particularly the area around the Barbes Rochechouart metro station has a very exotic feel to it. It has a bit of a seedy reputation, but I’ve never really felt threatened there at all. There’s lots of street life: hawkers of all sorts and you get the feeling that you’re in some sort of African bazaar. Among the “mealie ladies” flogging corn-on-the-cob “maïs, maïs, maïs”, and the sketchy looking dudes selling Marlboros and counterfeit Dolce Gabbana belts, there are a bunch of people handing out advertisements like the one below:



I’m starting to build a small collection of these.
Monsieur Sakho is what is known locally as a “marabout”. Those of you in Miami might recognize that as a “santero”. For the rest of you: a witch doctor or juju man. In this bold piece of advertising, Monsieur Sakho promises to “resolve all problems: don’t hesitate to contact me whatever your problem, there is always a solution. If you want to be loved or if your partner has left you for somebody else, that’s my specialty. You will be loved and your partner will come back to you. I will build a perfect understanding between you based on love. He or she will run after you like a dog behind its master.” Hmmm, like a dog behind its master, eh? Monsieur Sakho sounds like a kinky devil. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.

Even more interesting, below that he advertises his services in the fields of “marriage, luck, success, exams, contests, business, drivers license”. Did you catch that last one? Drivers licenses! You may recall from my post last week about how difficult it is to get drivers licenses over here that I’m having quite a hard time with it myself. Well, now I know that that whatever my problem, there is always a solution. I now understand how the local people manage to get around bureaucratic hassle in this country: sorcery! Instead of going to the US Embassy and calling my high school, I should have gone to see Monsieur Sakho. Next time, I’ll know. I wish I had known about Monsieur Sakho when I lived in DC, he might have got me out of paying some parking tickets.

Bush, the French DMV,my grades in high school and how all these things are connected

I graduated high school in 1990. I remember needing my high school transcript to gain admission into college that same year, but to the best of my recollection, that is the last time I ever needed it. Well, skip forward 18 years and I’ve needed it once again: this time to be allowed to drive in France. Logically, we wouldn’t want to have any high school dropouts on the roads over here: it’s well known that dumbasses cause accidents, after all.

I should start off by saying that I don’t really need a driver’s license over here since I don’t own a car. On the rare occasions when I rent one, my US license will do. But ever since I found out that Florida and France have a license reciprocity scheme, I figured I might as well get one, knowing that European drivers’ licenses are notoriously difficult and expensive to obtain. Getting a drivers license here involves paying many hundreds of euros for many hours of drivers’ training, and I’ve met many a foreigner who has been driving in their own country for ages who has failed the driving test over here. The testers here apparently get an almost sexual thrill from flunking foreigners. According to a friend of mine, it’s all a racket to feed more business to the “auto-ècoles”.

So the idea that I could just trade my Florida license (which a properly trained pomeranian could probably obtain without too much difficulty) for one of these precious and pricey items instinctively seemed like a good deal.

The adventure begins when I go down to the “prefecture” (same place we go to for our immigration papers: this is a highly centralized country), wait for a while in line and explain my situation to the clerk. This was back in February. He then gives me an appointment to come back in April and gives me a list of all the papers I will need to bring with me. This list includes all the usual “attestations”, including, of course, my electric bill. That’s all standard stuff. The more complicated part was that I needed: a certified translation of my US license as well as an “attestation” stating when I obtained my first license in the state of Florida. (the date my current license was issued is irrelevant). The man told me I could get this “attestation” from the US embassy. I tried to explain to him that the US embassy, a part of the federal US government, was unlikely to be able to certify licenses issued by the government of the state of Florida, which is, for all intents and purposes, just as administratively “foreign” as the Kingdom of Tonga. Here in France, of course, everything is centralized so the gummint is the gummint is the gummint.

So I call the US embassy to see what kind of stamped, official-looking document I can get from them. I’m of the theory that any document that looks official and has lots of stamps on it will do the trick with the French bureaucrats. The US embassy tells me the best they can do is have me write a sworn affidavit and notarize it for me. Good enough, thinks I, so I take a morning off of work and go stand in line with all the Haitian visa seekers, empty my pockets, hand over my cellphone to the biggest, meanest looking Filipino I’ve seen in my life, go through metal detectors, assure everybody that I’m not Osama bin Laden and I don’t have a bomb so I can then sit in a room with a third-world dictatorship-esque picture of El Presidente Bush staring down at me from the wall. It wouldn’t be so creepy if there wasn’t another one of Cheney right next to it. His eyes follow you around the room just like the Mona Lisa’s.

It turns out that the US embassy actually has a special form for this purpose (wish they had told me that on the phone). Basically I get to translate my own drivers license into French and the kind State Department officials will put a little stamp with an eagle on it, all for the low, low price of 30 euros (note to self: nice gig if you can get it). Among the fields to fill on the form is: date of issue of initial license. Now like I said, I don’t know the date of issue of my first license and it doesn’t say it anywhere on my current license, but oh well, I assume it was sometime near my 16th birthday, so I pick a random date in 1989. Voila, the date I just pulled out of my backside is officially Bushisized and I’ve got my translation and my attestation all in one shot.

I take another late morning from work to go to my appointment at the prefecture. I hand over all my prized documents and the lady shakes her head and says “non, non, non”. In a World War II movie, this is the bit where I would hear “Ihre Sokumenten sind nicht in Ordnung” and I’d be dragged away by goons. “How can you prove that you’ve actually been in the country for more than six months?” she queried. I point to my six month old electric bill. “Yes, but that only proves that you’ve had an apartment here, not that you’ve been living here. You could just be keeping an apartment here while living elsewhere.” Of course: doesn’t everybody summer in Paris and winter in Mustique? And then the rather more curious “how can you prove that you were living in Florida on the date that you obtained your first license?” (yes, remember? The date I made up) I didn’t dare ask what relevance this has to anything. Maybe I just popped by the Florida DMV during a layover between Mustique and St. Tropez. The conclusion is that I need to come back with: six months’ worth of payslips proving that I’ve been working in France and proof that I was a resident of the state of Florida on February 2, 1989 in the form of a high school transcript. Kafka would be having a field day right about now. You couldn’t make this shit up if you tried.

Since I’ve only been at my job for two months, this means I’ll have to wait four months until my next visit. On the plus side, I called up my high school and had an official transcript in my mailbox three days later. Thank you Gulliver Prep and the United States Postal Service. Maki decided to get her transcript, too, just in case, but she went to (gasp!) public school so she had to mail them a dollar bill (I’m 100% serious) and still hasn’t heard anything back. My parents will be glad to know that they got their money’s worth sending me to the Junior Colombian Cartel Country Club.