One:
Things in France can take awhile, but six months seemed a long time to wait to get reimbursed by my insurance company. I had been to a few doctor's who gave me a feuille de soins instead of using my carte vitale, and after Thursday's ultrasound, I thought it doubly important to check up on my reimbursements. The ultrasound cost 90 euros (which I realize is cheap by US standards, but it dug quite a hole in my pocket) and I had to pay upfront; the doctor then said, "So this is all on your card, no paperwork for you..." It occured to me that maybe I should check into getting some of that money back.
So I called my insurance company and they said, "Yeah, you have six payments that are queued up to be sent to you."
"Wow! Good news. Do I have to do something special?" I asked, realizing that since I haven't had a carte vitale in the five years I have been using French insurance, I wasn't entirely sure on how it worked.
"No, but we'll need your bank information in order to transfer the money," the insurance lady said.
"You have my bank information, you pull out money every month from my account," I pointed out.
"Yes, but that's in order for you to pay your monthly fees. We need the account info to send money to you."
"It's the same information," I said, surprised at the stupidity of our conversation.
"I know, but you'll need to send it in," she responded.
"But you have it all right there!"
"Yes, but we need you to send it in..." even she realized that this was ridiculous at this point.
"Ok, fine. Where do I send it to?"
"The same address you sent it to before," she said, and sort of chuckled.
"Ok... so I send the same information to the same address and you're going to magically know what it's for?" I asked.
"Put a little note with it: Here is my account information so that you can carry out my reimbursements."
Only in France.
Two:
I signed up for online banking the other day. The web site said, "Sign up online!" with a button. So I clicked it, and that led me to a .pdf that I had to print out and send in by mail.
I found that sort of ironic, "Sign up online" usually means that the whole process is done online. There should be no stamps involved.
But I let it slide, as France is still a few steps behind in the internet revolution.
Two weeks later, I get a letter (IN THE MAIL) that says, "Thank you for signing up for online banking with our bank. To access your account, you are going to need your customer login and your code. Please see your account representative to find out your customer login. Your code is at the bottom of this page."
So now I have to go to my bank (which is literally all the way across town) in order to see my banker, so that I can login to my account.
Signing up online has never been so easy! It just involves printing, signing and sending a form, waiting for a snail mail letter back, and then taking said letter and yourself physically to the bank to talk to somebody about getting an access code.
I'm still looking for the "online" part of that sign up process...
These are the kind of things that used to really piss me off, but now I actually find them endearing, like a crazy old aunt. It's like "oh france, there she goes again".
Haha. I love reading about life in france, and having lived in Europe myself, I can sympathize sooooo much about how long it takes to get some things done.
at least signing up online didn't involve minitel...
Oh, I gave up on the whole on-line banking thing; my boy uses it all the time, but I just found the ID/password process a pain in the butt, so I check my account at the distributeur on a regular basis... Ridiculous, I know, and not very convenient -- I mean, it's really my own fault for not following up on things carefully, but I think I got frustrated somewhere along the way at the beginning of the process, and decided not to follow through.
Speaking of which, my bank is across town now, too, as I used to live in the 18th and now am in the suburbs. And apparently changing branches is another whole pain in the arse... And I have a new CB waiting for me there! A while back, when I found out from the branch near I live that I could have my cheqier sent to that branch instead of having to PAY to have it paid to me, I was furious: no one ever told me this! How could I forget that customer service just isn't ingrained in the French? So I'm thinking that maybe I can request to have the CB sent to my local bank branch to pick it up there, instead of having to trek across town.
In sum, I can totally understand where you're coming from!
Um, should have checked that better -- I meant to say, of course, that I could have the chequier transferred to my branch so I wouldn't have to PAY to have it SENT to me, by mail of course... OOOPS!
Samantha's comment is dead on.
France is one crazy aunt.
Also in terms of item 1, after baby two was born I noticed that I wasn't getting my maternity leave payments so I called up the secu.
"We don't have proof that the baby was born."
"What? You can't possibly think that I would still be pregnant?" (10.5 months is not considered alot apparently)
"Well we didn't get the birth certificate."
Yes you did, no we didn't, yes you did.
Turns out that the BC was across the hall in another office because baby two was added to hub's insurance rather than mine.
They were cool though and just got a photocopy rather than me trucking into Paris to the appropriate Mairie for a new certificate...