Paris Journal 2012 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com
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Yesterday afternoon, we had the best post office experience ever in our time in Paris. Every year, we must do at least one thing at La Poste; at the very least, we must mail our absentee ballots for the August Florida primary back to the Supervisor of Elections in Fort Myers. Because of the size of the envelope, each ballot does not involve the use of a standard international postage stamp. No, it wouldn’t be right for it to be that easy! In the first several years that we spent summers in Paris, this task required patience and submitting to officious bureaucracy. Always, in those years, we’d have to wait in line at the nearest Poste. Always, we would interact with a French bureaucrat working behind a window of bullet-proof glass. Always, this was a tiresome, boring, but absolutely necessary errand. Voting is not optional in the Cooley household. It is part of the essential responsibility of living in a democratic society. We’d grit our teeth, and do it. It is hard enough, and time-consuming, to do the research to learn how to vote properly on all the obscure items on the August ballot. Only a few choices, like school board and United States Senator, are easy. After all that work on the ballot, the crowning annoyance has been the visit to La Poste. However, La Poste began to change a few years ago. One by one, the Poste offices were being shut down, remodeled, and re-opened. The banking operations of La Poste were also being modernized. The first time we experienced a remodeled Poste was two years ago, when our closest office was closed for remodeling. We walked a bit farther, to the Poste on rue de Lourmel; its remodeling was already complete. Gone were the windows called guichets with their bullet-proof glass and bureaucrats seated just beyond. These were replaced by machines, which we had to figure out how to use. The irony here is that by the time we were fluent enough to have no trouble communicating with a French-speaking-only bureaucrat at La Poste, we now had to switch to dealing with a French-only machine that had a not-so-intuitive user interface. It’s always something, just like Rosanna Rosannadanna used to say. Then last summer, we experienced the machines in our closest Poste, because the transition there had been made just as it had been done on the rue de Lourmel. It wasn’t so bad, but we did have to find a real person and ask one question at one point. That was a little tedious. (But we also then discovered the delightful change machines, into which we can put, for example, a ten-euro note and receive a number of one- and two-euro coins in exchange. Very useful!) This summer, I was confident that we could go in, figure out the machine that spits out customized postage, and do the entire thing without much if any help. But lo and behold, when we walked through the door and approached the nearest machine yesterday, a formally friendly little man in a bright-colored vest came up and greeted us. So I said, in my most polite French, hello sir, please, we would like to send these to the United States. He took the very official looking, slightly oversized envelopes and regarded them seriously – comme il faut – as one should. This is official democracy in action, after all. He then stood in front of the machine in such a way that we could see his every move as he went about weighing each ballot envelope, and pushing all the appropriate buttons on the machine’s touch screen, until it was time to ask me if I wanted a receipt. “S’il vous plait, monsieur,” I said. Then a second later, it was time to put the money in the machine. I had two 2-euro coins all ready to go, inserted them, clink clink they went down into the machine’s belly, and after a hiccup or two, the two custom-printed postage stamps, receipt, and 50-eurocent coin (change) fell into the bin near the bottom of the machine. Other than inserting the coins, the only part of the job that the friendly little man allowed us to do was to peel the stamps off their backing and affix them to the envelopes. Please sir, I asked him in my polite French, where do we find the letter box? He replied that he was the letter box. We all smiled, I handed over the stamped ballots, and we all said our thank you’s and good evenings. How very pleasant it was! No waiting! No officiousness! No bad user interface to decipher! Smiles! Good manners! Efficiency! Good humor! Oh my! Of course, the workers must not be completely replaced by machines at La Poste! The friendly little man (or woman) is necessary, to help the foreigners like us, and the aging people (like us), who may not know how to interact with such fancy machines! Such was our visit to La Poste in the modern era.
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Thursday, July 26, 2012
My
little still life/nature morte collection from various restaurants.
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