Close to You is the second album by The Carpenters, released in August 1970. The song named “(They Long to Be) Close to You” is a popular song written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. It was first recorded by Richard Chamberlain and released as a single in 1963. The version performed by the Carpenters is the best known one.

Clearly there is a feeling of love for France and all things French when a foreigner decides to sell everything to move to Paris. Sometimes this powerful feeling blurs the reality of living in a foreign country and disappointments come shortly thereafter. At times, the scrutiny of the French administration feels very intrusive to Americans who live in France; such Americans frequently have a typical knee-jerk reaction and want to protect their rights to privacy. The fact is, in many ways, France guarantees less privacy than does the USA, although it can be debated whether this is still true in today’s world.

On a much lighter note, people who have lived in France for the last 30 years can see the evolution of the French administration, which has become more accessible and, most of the time, more understanding in its dealings with the common man. I am not sure that recent immigrants would agree with this evaluation, as they generally are very intimidated when confronted with officials at the préfecture, the CPAM branch, or the tax office.

MS. HARRIET “HAT” STERSTEIN HAS DIED EARLY DECEMBER, OWNER OF MON BON CHIEN, THE BAKERY FOR DOGS IN PARIS
In my meetings at the office and my ministry at the church, I have helped people with so many different projects that I often feel each new client brings an opportunity to discover something totally original.

I remember the first meeting with Hat in my office. Her project of opening the first bakery for dogs in Europe sounded challenging to say the least, but it fascinated me, too, since I could see all the obstacles that needed to be overcome to open the shop and create a viable business. Several years after our first meeting, she told me that I was the only professional who took her plan seriously and was willing to work with her, which was why she chose me. I learned early on in life, from a project in archaeological aviation, that what makes the difference is not how crazy an idea sounds but how sound the business model is. If the revenue exceeds the costs by a sufficient margin, then it is worth creating the business; the rest is irrelevant as long as the business itself is legal.

I spent some of the most challenging and exhilarating moments of my professional life with Hat. Even today I recall our appointment with the inspection vétérinaire – the authority that grants the health permit to sell prepared food in a given location – as one of the five most gripping meetings of my professional life. I also have countless fond memories of her years in Paris, especially some of the parties she hosted at her shop. Rest in peace, Hat you are missed.

IT IS NOW EASIER TO BECOME FRENCH
Manuel Valls, France’s prime minister and former interior minister, has often stated his intention of making it easier to adopt French nationality, not by changing the rules but by redefining the requirements so that more people qualify. I remind my readers that he was born Spanish (Catalan) and was naturalized later in life. Before informing my readers that he was as good as his word, I wanted solid data proving it. There were 77,335 new French people last year, an increase of about 10% across all categories. Thus the improvement is not striking, but it is there. Keep in mind that it still takes over a year from the time the file is submitted until the decision is made. And, depending on the préfecture, there can also be a rather long delay to get an appointment.
http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/01/15/immigration-baisse-desregularisations-en-2014-hausse-des-naturalisations_4556914_3224.html#

PARIS CITY HALL IS BACK ON THE WARPATH AGAINST SHORT-TERM RENTALS
Without going into detail about the “war” on short-term rentals declared a few years ago by the previous mayor of Paris, Mr. Delanoë “rentals referred to in French as locations touristiques orlocations saisonnières ” I would like to remind readers that the legislation in effect until December 31st 2014 specified that the owner of an apartment used for such a purpose had to change the zoning to commercial so as to comply with zoning regulations, since this type of rental was treated like a tiny hotel made up of one suite. The standard procedure for changing zoning in Paris from residential to commercial involves turning a space of equivalent size from commercial to residential elsewhere in Paris. The limited experience I had with people trying to follow the law was that it was impossible. The procedure never went through, as there was always something missing.

Now a new law requires such trade-offs to be made within the same arrondissement. Paris is divided into 20 arrondissements, which correspond to the 20 postal codes in the city. Tourist rentals are concentrated in the first eight, that is, the central part, covering the Etoile and the Champs-Elysées, the Madeleine, the Opéra, the Place de la République, the Place de la Bastille, the Gare Montparnasse, Invalides and the Eiffel Tower. These are the priciest neighborhoods in Paris, which makes such swaps even more difficult and costly. There is also another new requirement  when turning a commercial space into a residential one, for every square meter of short-term rental apartment two square meters of commercial space must be turned into an apartment.

Meanwhile, the city is buying office spaces without business tenants, renovating them and turning them into modern apartments  which means the city is also collecting valuable real estate that could be used for additional vacation rentals. These can be sold: Le Monde says the market price ranges from 500€ per square meter to 2,000€ for premium locations where most short-term rentals are. The city can be expected to earn a fair amount of money this way, given the demand. Still, as I have often explained, the request to change these apartments into short-term rental units has close to no chance of success if city hall follows the same policy. The applicant must buy the real estate before submitting the request, so the money will be earned by city hall. Furthermore, if the request is successful, it will be difficult to sell the re-zoned spaces as lodgings, since they are zoned as hotel suites. Nevertheless, just as city hall is quite lenient when the change goes from commercial to residential, the same applies if the owner decides to live there permanently, for example.

My last comment may sound like it is motivated by pure cynicism, but it just reflects the reality of some aspects of French politics. A team of twenty civil servants was created, only five of whom have police clearance to enter lodgings. Yet city hall estimates that at least 20,000 apartments were being used for short-term rental in 2011 and about 3,000 new ones are added to the market yearly. I cannot see how a team of twenty people can tackle the job efficiently. At this point, official sanctions against the practice are more a calculated risk than a serious threat. I would estimate that each person on the team is responsible for at least 1,500 apartments, since the city’s figures are probably too low.
http://abonnes.lemonde.fr/logement/article/2014/12/24/paris-fait-la-chasse-aux-meubles-detourisme_4545803_1653445.html

Best regards,

QUESTION

HOW DOES THE PRÉFECTURE FIND OUT THE AUTO-ENTREPRENEUR STATUS?

I am an American working in France with a CDI with a salarié immigration status, which I renew every year. I recently registered for auto-entrepreneur status and I am looking for work this way. I am bound by an exclusivity clause (clause d’exclusivité) but when I check my contract it does not say anything about auto-entrepreneur . So I am not sure if I have the right to do this or not. My friend has been in a similar situation for a year, and he renewed his salarié visa with CDI and continues to work as auto-entrepreneur too. He has not faced any problems so far. Do I risk anything with my employer by having an activity on the side?

QUESTION

CAN ONE SPEED UP THE FRENCH ADMINISTRATION?

I received a French speeding ticket, then a second notice that I was late paying, at my home in the USA. Right now I am stuck at a point where I can’t pay the fine through the website dedicated for this (at the original or increased amount) and I am waiting for some sort of additional correspondence in the mail. I was doing some research online about the situation and cannot find how I can pay without waiting for the next step, which will be even more expensive. Do you have any suggestions on how to proceed?

The album A Space in Time was released in August 1971 by the British blues-rock band Ten Years After. I am a fan of the music of this period, as you can tell from the number of issues that take their titles from it.

This month I continue to address the statement I made last month that France, as a nation, « runs on grey » by sharing a couple of interesting comments I received. The « grey » French way of life can also be defined as getting some space or tolerance to make things happen. Foreigners have a hard time understanding when this grey area is available. It is clearly possible to negotiate before any definitive decision is made; after that, the official process starts which seals a given situation. Several foreigners have experienced this while submitting their requests submitted to the préfecture or the consulate.

One of the illustrations there is of what I mean by France, as a nation, « runs on grey » is, in effect, the use of this “wiggle space” at the right time, not too early and not too late. That is how I came up with this month’s title.

TWO READER’S COMMENTS : ON FRANCE, AS A NATION, « RUNS ON GREY »
1. As one who has lived between France and SE Asia (Malaysia and Indonesia) I am quite comfortable with grey, but I find so many others, particularly Americans, very uncomfortable with not doing something that they believe the law says. Of course, most Americans are naive about their own country and its history, yet they have trouble releasing these feelings and hence get frustrated with life abroad. Well done, Sir.

2. Fascinating. Do the bureaucrats have a school to go to, to learn how to be « grey »?
MY RESPONSE
My answer to the latter question could be,  French people learn « grey » from the cradle onwards! Every aspect of French life has a « grey » aspect. French children generally learn “grey” first at home, then in kindergarten.

In French, it’s called le système D, where D stands for « débrouille. » A reasonable translation of this would be artfulness, since it has a somewhat devious connotation.

Interestingly, the specific training French civil servants get, focuses exclusively on the technical aspects of a job and explains little if anything about management, team cohesion, or problem-solving techniques, since individuals do not count only the system matters.

READER’S COMMENT ON FRENCH BANKS
My introduction
This is an interesting comment since it comes from a senior lawyer. Even this legally-trained reader acknowledges signing documents without reading everything, and discovers that unpleasant consequences can follow. It might not make people feel any better to learn that this reader got treated in a « slimy » way and could even be challenged. Indeed, should an employee’s loyalty be with the employer or the client? Until recently this question was not conceivable in the USA. More and more often, clients are confronted with situations that give the impression that customer satisfaction is nothing more than a slogan in commercials aired on TV. This is true in France, and increasingly in the USA as well.

THE COMMENT
Just as your column came out, I was writing a short note to my charge de clientèle, who phoned me for an appointment to get to know me usually a banking euphemism for trying to sell you another product.

After nice beginnings, things turned sour for me when I made payments to the US FICA/SSA as a freelancer in the 1980s. My instructions clearly indicated that the bank, which issued the check and sent it directly to the IRS from NY, should put my SS number on the check. At the time of signing the request for the third transfer, I thought to ask the clerk (the same one as for the others) to make sure that the SS number would be on the check. « Ah, no, » she replied, « that’s not possible on a French check; there’s no space. » Well, having used French checks for more than a decade, I knew that that wasn’t true. I reassured myself by asking whether my order was in fact transferred to their agent bank in NY, in which case they «  as Americans or at least US-based »  would certainly know the importance of putting the SS number on the check. Yes, she said.

Well, a few months later when I was back in the bank, the same clerk said, « Oh, Mr. xx, this message in English came in a while ago; it might have to do with your transfers. » Indeed, the IRS was asking my bank from whom these payments were coming, and they requested a reply by a certain date, which had already gone by. And of course the clerk hadn’t thought to use a telephone to call a client whom she knew well. (She wasn’t my chargée de clientèle.) I managed to clear up the matter, and soon moved my major account to another bank, Citi, later to be disappointed by them. As banks do.

But I maintained accounts there because a checking account is supposedly free if you keep a positive balance (not true nowadays), and the chargée de clientèle had had me buy into a couple of privatizations of 1986-88 (public corporations going privately owned), which were being held at their bank. So I continued to use this bank to participate, very marginally, in privatizations as they came up. Even when my bank wrote to me about various things related to my stockholdings at their bank, the letters always said to contact my branch for further information. On the few occasions when I did this, the agency said they didn’t know what I was talking about, and would I please fax them the letter from their own bank.

After a while, they started charging droits de garde for the stock that they « helped » me buy. In fact, their advice was wrong on one particular privatization, when I told them I wanted 100 shares, got eight, and was told that if I wanted 100 I should have asked for 1000 or more. That’s the kind of advice one would like from a bank that’s charging you for holding your shares.

After several complaints about paying a quarterly fee for a checking account and droits de garde (except on the shares of the bank), they finally came up with a « solution » for me which was to change the other shares into SICAVs issued by the bank, for which there would be no droits de garde. But they « forgot » to say that the droits d’entrée for purchasing the SICAVs was equal to about 1.5% of the value, or about two years of droits de garde for a 1275 purchase. The same week, my US bank, which holds shares and makes purchases and sales following advice from my local financial adviser, bought a bunch of mutual fund shares and the charge was $9 for about a $22,000 purchase.

In any case, my new chargée de clientèle had been quick to point out my savings on droits de garde, without informing me of the droits d’entrée, whoops! And, as to the charges for keeping a checking account (where I almost never draw checks), she’d cut that in half for one year, she said, but couldn’t promise more.

As you point out, there were forms of long texts to sign for this, and somewhere in there was certainly this thing about droits d’entrée. I nearly joked with her as I was signing the various pages, along the lines of Of course, I’ve read all this before signing. But I refrained from making that « joke. » I have just sent her a note, though thanking her for her welcome and advice (on avoiding droits de garde), but pointing out the difference in acquiring shares between the cost in the US and in France, adding that this might perhaps explain French aversion to being share owners, whereas Americans (50%) are quite happy to own stock. Oh, well.

THE FRENCH LOCAL TAX – TAXE D’HABITATION
There is a lot to say about the local tax since it is tied to so many things. This tax is levied on the primary or secondary residence of the inhabitant on January first and must be paid for the entire year. It is not paid on resorts, vacation places, or hotels. The primary residence is supposed to be the one mentioned on the previous year’s French income tax declaration. On the first page, there is a box to declare if the taxpayer moved before January 1st and a different one if a move occurred after that date. This is the most common way the tax authorities determine whom to tax for which lodging.

As often, everyday life rarely fits those forms. My daughter finished her bachelor’s degree last September with an exchange program between her French school and a university in the USA. She had rented a studio for the previous years and we paid her taxe d’habitation for the years she was there on January 1st. It happens that the second semester started on January 3rd so she left Rennes, where she went to school, on December 23rd to celebrate Christmas with us, and left France on Dec 27th and did not go back to Rennes for school for the rest of the year except for two days in June for administrative issues. As a young adult who was very rushed to get everything done, she did not terminate her lease and give the keys back to the landlord. On January 14th my wife did the inspection of the place and turned turned in the keys.

When the 2013 taxe d’habitation bill came, I contested it, providing the plane ticket, the registration with the American university and her transcripts. Clearly she did not have her primary or even secondary residence in Rennes. The tax office asked me for the état des lieux de sortie, which is the final walk-through document, and the last electricity or phone bill. Since this happened in January 2013, my request was denied because my daughter had kept the usage of this place and she could have come back to it regardless of the distance.

As often happens with French administrative decisions, at the end of the letter there was an explanation of the various ways of appealing the decision. I chose the most amicable one, writing to the conciliateur fiscal, a mediator, who is part of the French tax administration. My strongest argument was that my daughter had taken everything that belonged to her out of the studio so how could it be her residence? After a while, I got a positive answer. Nevertheless, the opposite argument was just about as valid: as long as the landlord does not have the keys back, the tenant keeps the ultimate right to use the place.

The sticky issues with this tax are most often related to moving in late December or early January, especially for those who move out of France. Indeed, anyone who moves within France does not mind paying for such a short occupation of one residence, since the new one is exempted until the following year.

FRENCH INTERNET PROVIDERS
This is another of those situations where the client feels trapped, and rightfully so. Most Internet contracts are for either one or two years, and the client cannot get out of the contract without severe penalties. According to the providers logic, clients do not need to terminate the contract even when they move to a new home.

The main penalty is having to pay, in one lump sum, the monthly fees until the end of the contract. So, changing providers becomes costly unless you are patient and focused enough to do it at the right time.

There are several legitimate reasons to cancel your contract without penalty, but the client has to prove, the French way, his or her compliance with these. The most common grounds are:

• 1 – Moving to a foreign country
• 2 – Bankruptcy (surendettement).
• 3 – Unemployment
• 4 – Long-term medical care

Each provider has its own contract that offers more or fewer of such conditions. So you should read the contract very carefully before giving notice, which must be done by registered letter. When this exceptional request is approved, the notice period only lasts for ten days from the day the letter arrives. Then there is the issue of returning the equipment to the company, when often the client has left France by then. The alternative is to terminate the contract several weeks before departure to take into account the ten-day period plus the postal delay for sending a registered letter and receipt of the documentation the company sends so the equipment can be sent back.

The real problem involves what each provider expects as proof, especially for moving out of France. Some ask simply for a document that proves the use of an address in another country, such as a utility bill or a bank statement. Others, including Orange, ask for proof less than three months old, establishing not just that you have secured the address but that you actually live there such as the first page of the IRS 1040 form. Bringing this proof when you are in the process of moving back to the USA, for example, is impossible; it takes a few months to gather these types of documents and sometimes longer if you are staying with friends or family members at first, which happens quite often.

In other words, these corporations are violating their own contracts by making it almost impossible to comply with the level of requirements they have established. The client moving out of France needs to determine what is the cheapest and simplest thing to do: pay for the contract until its expiration date or have the residency in the USA fully secured at least a couple of months before moving there.

American internet providers do not have a good reputation, and the French ones are not really much better. Through my clients I have some experience with several of them when it comes to cancellation, and there is a wide range in the quality of their services.

Best regards,

QUESTION

ANY TOLERANCE WHEN SPEEDING IN FRANCE

Anne-Claire Bocage, founder of www.MyAmericanMarket.com, an online grocery for hard-to-find American products in France, asked me about four years ago if she could publish excerpts from my column in the MyAM newsletter. I received this question through her.

I got a ticket for doing 91 km/h in a 90-km/h zone. Isn’t there any margin at all? Can this be contested? Seems pretty ridiculous as I thought I was doing exactly 90 (according to the setting on my cruise control).

QUESTION

LENGTH OF STAY ON THE VISA APPLICATION BOX #27

I am an American and I am getting ready to ask for a long-stay visa to come to France. Does it matter what we put in box 27? We intend to stay only five or six months each year. Maybe I should check the box that says six months to one year?

QUESTION

CARTE DE SEJOUR COMMERCANT & K-BIS

I work for a small multinational and I have been appointed the Senior Manager of the French branch located in Paris. I asked for a long-stay visa at the French consulate in Chicago, and after several trips there, waiting a long while and giving an impressive amount of documents, I finally got it. Upon my arrival in France, I had to redo exactly the same thing, giving the same documents but this time to the préfecture. The French staff helped some. I thought the last meeting would be the final one but the préfecture stated that I needed to come once again with an updated K-Bis. I do not get it  the current one has my name on it and the address of the company’s headquarters in France where my office is. What more do they want?

« A Horse with No Name » is a song written and first recorded by the British band America. It was released in early 1972.
The lyrics are very poetic and describe an epic journey in a desert. This line is repeated numerous times through out the song: In the desert you can to remember your name
I associate dealing with the French administration and numerous other large French corporations with being confronted with the desert. This comes from the sense of dryness, the absence of human connection, the frightening feeling of dealing with an organization of gigantic size that moves with a lot of power.
Almost all the topics this month are related to this aspect of French life. There are objective reasons why the initial contact is so cold and distant, why the service rendered feels so overwhelmingly anonymous.
At the same time, we have all at least once experienced unexpected relief at the moment when a civil servant steps out of his glacial attitude and becomes really helpful, showing care and concern, becoming surprisingly eager to fix the problem, to find the solution, even asking his colleagues, who are also happy to get involved. These people are now functioning under the “French grey area rule” – strict compliance with the regulations is temporarily not applicable.
France, as a nation runs on grey, which is very scary for foreigners who can only feel safe when they know that they are obeying the law. France needs a minimum of informal flexibility and, currently, this can only come with a “grey” approach.
Mastering the art of living safely in the grey area is an essential skill to acquire in order to enjoy the beauties associated with a certain « joie de vivre » in France, and, therefore, with the French way of life.
Until then, foreigners often find themselves obliged to listen very carefully, while waiting anxiously to be called, hoping to remember how the French pronounce their names or the numbers they are holding as they wait for their appointments.
My last issue spurred a lot of vehement reactions of very different kinds badmouthing the French banking system, standing with the French against the French bashing that Americans often do, and so on. I chose one negative and one positive to illustrate this as well as to show how misconceptions can be hurtful.

READER AS COMMENT ON FRENCH BANKS
“I always enjoy your explanations of French ways that so mystify the Anglophone. This time, however, you’ve done your countrymen a great disservice.

“In justifying the way this man’s bank handled his rental security deposit, you state that a caution through a bank is simply a lien on an asset. So far, so good. Next, you say the bank charges a fee for providing this service. Fine. But that is where it all falls apart.

“Fees should be clearly spelled out in any documentation. And, a lien is simply a legal document that requires no ongoing management. Presumably, then, the fee for a bank to handle a caution should be a nominal, one-time charge. Whatever the fee was, it should have been made clear at the outset and there should have been no surprise at the back end.

“You rationalize what happened to this tenant by saying expressly that as far as the bank was concerned,; everybody knows how the system really works so they didn’t need to tell him. On that basis we can rationalize all manner of mischief, can’t we? Anyway, this man was obviously a foreigner. If his language skills weren’t a dead giveaway, how about the fact that he needed the bank to handle his caution in the first place? A bank is a highly sophisticated institution. Caveat emptor doesn’t wash here.

“Perhaps if you are French and understand how French banks really work then you are better equipped to deal with this sort of situation … although as you point out it’s a situation a French person by definition would never encounter. But you are far more sophisticated than the average French person. Dollars to donuts (as we Americans say), the average French person would have no idea the money they understood to be safely on deposit was actually being placed in a CD or money market fund at risk of personal loss to them.

“The facts presented by this man are that he requested no investment, and that the contract specified no investment. You are arguing that the contract didn’t really mean what it said because, well, this is France and everybody here knows that things work differently. Is that the message you really wanted to convey?”

MY RESPONSE
The origin of this painful situation was that this foreigner did indeed sign documents that he/she did not understand. This is a bad thing to do and everybody knows it. However, almost daily we engage in contractual agreements that we have not read, and therefore we operate on pure assumption. Most of the time, this does not create serious problems because the odds are that nothing bad will happen and the normal line of action is simple, not to say basic. Think of going to the grocery store and walking out after having paid for what you wanted to buy: in 90% of cases this is all you need to know. The same thing can be said about, using public transportation, ATM machines, phones, etc. The truth is that we all live in societies where business agreements are neither negotiated nor signed. The few times there is a real need for signature, the common thing done by huge corporations is to give you a form to sign with clauses on the back in small print that are virtually impossible to grasp even by an average native speaker. A foreigner in such a case is totally trapped unless someone goes over the clauses and explains them. The professional should do this in order to be fair, but how often is this done?

Therefore, I can easily see how this client of the bank signed, trusting the professional working there, without checking anything for him or herself.

Now, the most fundamental jobs of a bank are to safeguard the money clients deposit in their accounts, and to lend money to clients who need it. The loan can be secured or unsecured. This is banking 101. Ever since the first bank was created, this is what the banking industry has done. A bank guaranty is nothing more than a promise to pay money in certain circumstances, the promise being secured by a lien, on the car, or on a portfolio, or a mortgage, which is the specific one for real estate. The bank guaranty is a mechanism very close to a loan. There is nothing complicated here for a bank. The client may be confused because this is not commonly done for individuals. The best way I can explain this is by using the comparison with buying a car with borrowed money. As long as you pay, you keep the car. Should you stop paying the loan, the car is repossessed. That is what a secured loan is.

I am really not sure that the client had a problem with this set-up as such. He/she understood the lien and the need to leave money in the bank. I believe that what he/she did not understand was that the bank charged a fee every year, a tiny percentage of the amount of the guaranty, and that the money would not be in a traditional savings account but invested in a mutual fund, called a SICAV in French.

To specifically address your question:
The facts presented by this man are that he requested no investment, and that the contract specified no investment. You are arguing that the contract didn’t really mean what it said because, well, this is France and everybody here knows that things work differently. Is that the message you really wanted to convey?

What I am saying is that a bank in France offers a range of services that Americans are not used to, even though the evolution in the USA is going in that direction. This means that at your local branch in France, the client has access to all basic banking services, and can also trade on any market, give instructions to the portfolio manager, invest in mutual funds, invest in annuities, and buy homeowner, health and car insurance policies. Most foreigners do not expect such a large range of services to be available at a local branch. Furthermore, in our case, the client never gave written instructions not to invest money, and I am sure that the bank had given this client all the documents needed to set everything up and that all the information was there, provided the client had the ability and the time to read all the fine print.

So yes, it is very clear that, for numerous things, things are done differently in France, just as in most countries.

The message I wanted to convey when choosing this topic was that getting all the information is critical for foreigners living in France, or any other foreign country, for that matter. Making assumptions in a foreign country is an extremely dangerous thing to do. This sad situation would have never happened if the client, before signing, had asked all the questions needed to understand the mechanics and the steps that a bank takes to implement a bank guaranty in France.

SECOND READER IS COMMENT REGARDING PARDON MY FRENCH
Thanks as always for your great column. I read this one with great interest because I often hear this expression in the USA. This drives me crazy because it perpetuates an unfair stereotype of the French. My husband and I purchased a home in Menton two years ago and plan to retire here just under 6 months every year. The rest of the time we live in Florida. We have found our experiences with the French to be wonderful. From visiting our bank, to working with our real estate agent, to renovating our apartment while still living 5000 miles away in the USA, we have had great experiences. Sure, once in a while we encounter a rude person, but that certainly happens in the US as well. It is the exception rather than the rule.

For the past several years, whenever someone says pardon my French to me, I stop them in their tracks by simply saying, I did not know you spoke French and then I start speaking to them in French. It really makes them think twice about what they are saying. Sometimes folks just do this out of habit, other times out of ignorance. Either way, it is wrong and I hope someday this will stop. After all, imagine if people said, Pardon my English prior to using an expletive – Americans and Brits would be up in arms!

Keep up the great work on your column! And no, you have nothing to apologize for in being French. The French are magnifique!

Best regards,

QUESTION

NO NAME TAGS IN FRANCE WHY?

It’s always with great interest that I read your newsletters. They are very informative. One small question that you may want to address in the future: why are French employees always so reluctant to give out their names? They often look offended and will refuse to do so. I always like to keep track of people’s name for my records and, as you know, it’s a very common practice in the US. In fact, many employees have name-tags, which is probably illegal in France  French employees may not want to give out their names but if you call back and say, “someone in your office or on the phone told me ,”, they will immediately ask you “Qui vous a dit ça ?” = Who told you that?

QUESTION

WHO MANAGES FRENCH RETIREMENT FUNDS?

It’s always with great interest that I read your newsletters. They are very informative.I have been working in France for a large corporation for several years now and once in a while I receive documents I do not understand. A couple of times I asked my colleagues what it was and their answer was,It is for your retirement, without any more explanation. My problem is that it comes from many different sources. I have identified two, C.N.A.V., and Malakoff Médéric. The last thing is that my employer opened a bank account without my permission, and I get a statement once a year. I still cannot make any sense of all this. Can you help?