Rent-a-baby

If you want to experience French bureaucracy at its finest, you could do no better than to visit the Prefecture to obtain a Carte de Sejour, a long-term visa, needed by those wishing to stay in France longer than three months. 

There are things one needs to know before setting out on this mission. Getting a Carte de Sejour is not usually achieved in one trip. It took our American friend Julia three visits, which is about average. The line outside the Prefecture starts at 7 a.m. Local legend has it that only 50 people are served on any given day. Number 51 gets to return the next day at an ambitiously early hour.

The person in charge at the CNRS (Jeroen’s employer) gave us some forms and a list of documents to photocopy before leaving for an extended holiday. We needed recent photographs, copies of “useful” pages of our passports – we found out in time that they meant “used” pages-- proof of address, pay slips, letters from the CNRS, telephone and electricity bills, and marriage and birth certificates, offically translated into French. The translation office used by the French embassy in Washington DC is no good because, perhaps because it is does little to further the French economy. We triple checked everything and got there at 8 am when we saw two queues, one for the carte de sejour and a much shorter one for automobile registrations. Not as bad as we feared.

Two women from the Prefecture with white silk flowers in their buttonholes stepped out to answer questions. One of them looked at my paperwork and asked, “Are you from Sophia?” Jeroen said no, I said yes. Mine was the right answer; the CNRS is located in Sophia Antipolis. Jeroen, in his best French, was busy denying that we were Bulgarian. The woman said that we would be better off to have the paperwork sent to them from Sophia when the liaison person returned. Our situation might be too complicated for her colleagues to understand. We were not ready to turn back, not yet.

The doors opened promptly at nine. We entered the foyer, which brought Dostovesky to mind. The short car registration line opens into the same foyer. Some switched to join the front of our line, probably returning petitioners. People who’d arrived after we had in the morning were now ahead.

A Tunisian gentleman left the line for a few minutes and returned with coffee and directed us to a vending machine. Jeroen congratulated him on his country’s successful revolution and its influence and inspiration. He smiled and offered a sip of his coffee.

At the main desk, someone cursorily checked our dossier and gave us a token. We sat on orange plastic chairs in a busy basement room with monitors suspended from the ceiling to direct token holder to counters where they would presumably be served. Behind one of these counters was a woman in a red blouse looking at her computer screen and tapping on her keyboard. She had no clients. Was she playing Tetris? Her fingers moved too slowly. It had to be Minesweeper and she wasn’t about to be blown away. Perhaps she was a trainee, doing well judging by her sulk and the work she wasn’t doing. She got up once in a while to distract a colleague. More time squandered.

With A-36 in our hands, and A-32 on the monitor, we thought our turn was near. However, we hadn’t anticipated the wave of strollers and lovely children, bringing the room to life at 10 a.m. They formed a new line at the main counter and received golden tokens. From A-32 it went C-01, then C-02, and then C-03. An entirely different series claimed priority. The C-series, dedicated to the elderly, the impaired, the pregnant, and especially mothers with children who had skipped a morning dose of ADHD medicine.

When it was our turn one and a half hours later, it went smoothly. We were out in 20 minutes and in my hand I had a paper, a visa of sorts. (Julia says we’ve set a new record). Now that I can work in France, I want to start a business: a childcare facility across from the Prefecture in Nice. The rent-a-baby service would be a sister concern.