Smitten: Book II: Little known facts about France

1) France has a bureaucracy the likes of which Terry Gilliam would have
trouble understanding. In Australia, bureaucracy exists, yet no-one knows
exactly how it works or why. In Australia, it is possible to circumvent the
bureacracy by pretending to know more about it than the person/civil servant
you are dealing with. That does not work in France. The bureaucracy here is
an entity of itself. It pays taxes. It probably works for Microsoft and
isn't likely to change jobs any time soon. It probably watches English
football and barracks for Arsenal. The French fear it. Any request to any
French person will immediately be answered "Non". The reason is that the
request may require the person to face the bureaucracy, and that could kill
them, and why risk your life for someone? You may have seen that IBM ad on
tv where the American woman wants to make a purchase from two arrogent
French checkout chicks. They don't ignore her because they are arrogent,
they ignore her as an American is never worth dying for. There is one single
way to get things done here: shout. If you can give the impression that you
will kill them, a person is willing to face the bureaucracy as a lesser of
two evils, but only as it is exceptionally rare that the bureaucracy has to
be consulted. It is probably in a meeting with Bill anyway. They don't teach
this in French school, but the number one tip when travelling in France is
to shout at any opportunity at anyone. What's more, the French will actually
love you for it. The second most important tip is to stay away from the
bureaucracy. Before you even take your first breath in France, you should
try to think of a way that any bureaucracy could fuck you over for taking
the breath. If you can think of a way, any way, then don't do it, as the
French bureaucracy will fuck you over for doing it. Why did the French
develop such a bureaucracy? Simple, it hides them from God. Noone can claim
the French are unduly noticed by God, He is much more concerned with
Americans and, for some reason, the Greek. My theory is that God's power can
only work subtly and He cannot shout loud enough for the French to pay any
attention.

2) If you buy a laptop in France, the keyboard has a layout which is almost,
but not quite, completely different from the US/British ones we use in
Australia. Why? Who the fuck knows. Same reason their power plugs are
different, their phone plugs are different, their television colour system
is different, their RGB plugs at the back of their tv are different and if
anyone knows the answer to that, i'll buy them an island. In the mean time,
for fun, those of you with Macintoshes should go to the Control Panels and
select French in the keyboard control panel. Hours of fun.

3) If you channel flip in Australia, you will most likely get sport or some
kind of game show. Here, you either get hours long interviews with random
people off the street, or hours long interviews with little known
celebrities. Which means that tv is not an option for me here, and I will
spend my time writing boring emails.

"Stay out of God's radar"