The good: I don't know if you remember, but last year I had lost my wallet out in Toulouse one night, and after hours at the police station filing a report, I heard nothing back. Then a few months later I saw on my blog that someone had left a comment on the post I had written about the whole affair telling me that they had found my wallet and brought it to the police station. I went to check, not really believing it since I hadn't heard anything from the police, and lo and behold, a almost 4 months later and only weeks before my departure, I was reunited with my wallet. OK, so cut to this year. Yesterday I ran into town during some time between classes to check out the nation-wide semi-annual sales going on right now (I've been holding myself back for weeks), I go into a store, try something on and leave. An hour later I decide to go back to the store to buy it. I wait in line and pay. As I'm putting the bag and my wallet back into my backpack someone standing in line behind me says "Lindsay?" I stand up and look at the woman speaking to me racking my brain for who this person could be. "It's me who found your wallet last year, how are you?" The woman's Australian living in Toulouse with her boyfriend and she recognized my wallet. (Well, and me apparently we talked breifly that night at the bar and when I left, she saw it had fallen out of my bag on the floor #notoneofmyfinermoments). We exchanged info and are getting drinks sometime. How crazy?
The bad: I'm STILL waiting for a used computer that my parents sent me from the US a month ago. My parents have been calling UPS stateside and I've been calling the post office here incessantly. Two weeks I called the Post and they told me that three weeks wasn't unusual to wait and to call back next week. So I do this past Friday and when I re-read them the package number they tell me that I'm calling the wrong agency, and its actually a different one (i.e. I was calling UPS when I should've been calling FedEx). Talk about information that would've been useful when I called and gave the same number weeks ago. So I go on this new agency's website and search the package number. My package shows up and I see that it has been stuck at cusoms in Paris since December 28th, and that since that date they have allegedly been trying to reach the sender or receiver for "additional information." So I call the number on the site to find out what the heck is going on up there, and of course am greeted by an automated service. In my very best French I specify that I am the recipient of an international package. And I wait, and wait...and wait.
Twenty minutes later a woman answers. I re-read her the package number. Why do they even bother with the machine? Is it just to give the caller the illusion of being busy, annunciating single word answers like an idiot in a spelling bee alone in your kitchen only to be put on hold and asked the same information by a human? She responds "Ohhh you need international shipping. This is the national division." At this point, I'm done being the nice foreigner who appologises for her accent or her need for things to be repeated at least twice. Thanks to all the merde of late, my angry French has progressed from fumbling, suject-omitting, and unconjugated to relatively well articulated French that communicates I'm pissed off, even if my accent makes you laugh.
I explain that I've already waited for 20 minutes and clearly stated to the putain de machine that I was looking for international. She assures me she will connect me toute de suite, madame. Right away. I wait. And wait. What a waste of time. And how scary that this many people are calling about international packages on a Friday morning? I do the dishes. I knit a mitten. I go to the bathroom. Thank God for hands free. Isn't it funny the things people will get into while on hold to "stay busy"? And don't they always pick up just when you start praying they won't? Maybe it's an American thing, like I will not let my productivity be derailed by something as banal as being put on hold. Maybe the French accept this bureaucracy as part of life, sit back and have a coffee or smoke a cigarette. Just chill.They probably do. I bet they do. Heck, maybe that's what the person who was supposed to be answering phones was doing too. Unfortunatley, I didn't have either, so was up to my elbows in dishwater when someone picked up forty minutes later.
She explains that I need to send an email to customs including the contents of the package, and also promising to pay a 20 percent tax on non EU imports should they choose to impose it upon (eventual) delivery. Then they will release it. It was this exact tax I was trying to avoid by having a used computer sent, and not a new one. Merde. I've sent the email and still haven't any news. I'm quite sick of being the one to waste my time and pick up the pieces after somethign that wasn' my fault, but, c'est la vie.
The ugly: OK, there really isn't any ugly, I just liked the title. Unless you count the ugly appartment building being built next to my house. Plus the frog's are ga-ga about Clint, so it's fitting.
A bientôt!
Linz
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