Call me on le téléphone
One of the big things that we’ve had to adapt to in France is the still overwhelming reliance on the telephone. Until we arrived here I really didn’t appreciate just how much everything in Canada was done over e-mail.
Or how rather anti-human that was.
France is in fact a very on-line country, with government encouraging, or insisting, that almost everything be handled on-line. They even manage to mostly do this successfully.
Still, when there is a problem it is always solved over the phone. Or when you need an answer to a question today, and not next week, you call. Or if your situation is in any way complex, you deal with it over the phone.
The bonus of course to dealing with all of this in France is that the people on the other end are also in this country, and usually in the same town as you. I have yet to call a French phone number and find myself connected to some poor underpaid person in a developing world sweatshop trying to survive a day of following the prompts on a screen in a language that may be their third or fourth.
And, thus far, everyone that we’ve talked to in both the public and private sectors has been nice, and patient, and even knew what they were doing.
(Of course, your ability to speak French is important, even though many people will make a good attempt to struggle along with their equally sketchy English.)
(ps - I actually owned the phone in the picture.)