When you need to register a vehicle, apply for a work permit or get or change a driving licence in France, the Prefecture is where you go. It’s the pits.
If Sarkozy found a civil servant ‘in flagrante delicto’ with his rather tasty wife he woudn’t sack him. He wouldn’t even kill him. Nope – a fate worse than death itself is to be sent to a Prefecture somewhere, most probably Nice. It’s where French civil servants are sent to rot and die in the utter boredom of trying to deal with hordes of immigrants and ex-pats, none of whom have the correct paperwork, and who get increasingly upset at having to queue for hours to do something they could do online – if only the systems existed.
My last visit was a few months ago in May to re-register Guy’s scooter (http://tomsfrenchblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/la-centre-administratif-prefecture.html) and I had to go again last week to change the paperwork for my new scooter. I was quite lucky in May in that I only had to queue for a few hours before I was called but I’ve been reading recently of near riots at the Nice Prefecture as hundreds of people turn up to two hours before the doors open, only to find themselves shoved roughly aside as the non-queue respecting French rush in. The police are regularly called and apparently now ‘man’ the doors each morning as they open.
I feared the worst and arrived at 10.15am. It all seemed fairly quiet until I got to the ‘carte grise’ (vehicle registration document) section. A cursory check of my paperwork allowed me a number in the queue – 609. I rushed round to look at the digital readout to find that they were only calling number 467 – I was 142nd in the queue.
I got my iPhone out and typed in the following equation:
(X * Y) ÷ Z ÷ 60
Where X is the number before me in the queue, Y is the 7 minutes it takes to deal with each person and Z is the number of windows open to deal with the public. Divide all this by 60 to get a result in hours and you – faint! It was going to be nearly 3.5 hours before I would be called!
My grand strategy however was to change my British driving licence at the same time, so having put my 609 ticket somewhere safe (you need to show it to prove you’ve been in the queue), I headed round to the Permis De Conduire section. I drew number 90 and worked out that there were 23 people ahead of me which doesn’t sound too bad until you work out that it takes about 10 minutes to issue or change a licence and there are only two windows. These are the documents I needed to produce:
1. Application Form
2. Passport
3. Photocopy of passport
4. French ID Card
5. Photocopy of same
6. 2 passport sized photographs
7. Original birth certificate
8. Photocopy of same
9. Official French translation of birth certificate
10. Photocopy of same
11. 2 Utility bills
12. Old driving licence
13. Photocopy of same
No wonder it took 10 minutes!
I headed back round to the Carte Grise section about an hour later to see what was happening. Only 6 people had been called! I listened to Talksport on my iPhone for about 45 minutes (thank god for miracles of modern science)and then returned to the licence section. They were at number 85 – well ahead of schedule. I was soon to find out why.
I was called about 30 minutes later by one of the two women officials, and like in May found that she had a ‘Jordanesque’ cleavage and was wearing the lowest cut top she could without being arrested for indecency. A quick bonjour, a quick look at my inch-thick wad of papers and she smiled. ‘You’ve come to the wrong Prefecture. You need to go to Grasse’.
Now, under normal circumstances I would have thrown my papers up in the air and screamed and shouted, but after 10 years in France I am phlegmatic about these situations. I simply said my thanks and headed back to the Carte Grise section to see if things had improved.
‘Section closed for the rest of the day due to systems malfunction’ !!!!!!
PS - I had a problem finding a picture for this post until I read an article on a French guy who, after working in the French Civil Service for many years, was found to have virtually no brain. It's true!
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