Less arse in my lobster, please.

[pphaneuf]

Struggles with the bank, leaving me highly annoyed. They're open from 8:35am to 5pm, Monday to Friday, with a break at lunch (ha! you thought you could sneak out of work and go there, think again!). I have to be at work at 9:30 at the latest (for which the useful last train is at 8:38am), and cannot leave until 4:30pm (there's no useful train until 5:10pm). Note how they manage even to beat Desjardins in term of sucky opening hours (they opened for a bit on the Saturday, and were open late one of the week days). You also have to know that their ATMs are rather limited and can pretty much only do withdrawals, due to lack of demand (the French like to be insulted in person, so they can return the favour or something), so I can't deal with simple things like depositing a cheque without taking time off work. And I'm told I shouldn't have too much hope with regard to paying bills via the Internet, that might be a tad futuristic. Finally managed to get my banking card on the Monday morning (yeah, I'll be late at work), but they can't set the PIN there, they will mail it to me. I don't know yet if I'll be allowed to change it to something of my choice.

Note as well how I am becoming more French by the second, whining about anything and everything. But I see how this works, it's very much an environmental thing.

I made a phone call Monday afternoon that I wasn't too eager to put in, but you've got to do what you've got to do. Putting my relationship with tygrbabe on hold, while I get my things properly sorted out with azrhey. It went much better than I thought it would, but then, it almost always does, for this sort of things. It was nice talking to her, though, being the first time since I left (I'm not much of a phone person!). She took it pretty well at first, but it seems things turned around today. I trust she'll manage well, and there's liberation_now watching over her, it'll be okay.

Meanwhile, azrhey finally visited the apartment we had our eyes on, and it doesn't seem to have any glaring problem. I'm dealing with the manager of our office to have someone from the company (or the company itself) vouch for me or something. Renting an apartment around here is quite involved. We've gone to the real estate agent and gave them all sorts of paperwork, with yet more in my bag for someone at my company to back me up, in case I run off into the night.

Going to work Tuesday morning, I managed to wipe out on my bike, with a bunch of road rash. It's not as sensitive to the touch as yesterday, but today I'm all sore where I hit the pavement. It was all rather silly. I was going slowly, as I was heading toward a sidewalk, but went under a tree. Now, that tree sheds a layer of stuff, leaving a fine layer on the pavement, that turns out to be made with something oily. Combined with the rain of the night, this turned into grease, basically (I checked it out after getting up, it was slippery even for a pedestrian!). I was going in a straight line, but as soon as I touched the brakes, both wheel locked and the bike went away from under me. Ow.

The coding at work is a bit boring, considering that I arrived during a stabilization phase for a release, but I'm still rather busy reading code and doing some easy refactorings to help me understand the code better. I'm longing to do something for myself, and I've got quite the list of ideas, I'm just not sure where to start. Maybe port Quadra to Mac OS X?

We also got cellphones yesterday. I wanted to get a Motorola V3i (the revision of the RAZR), but (check this out!) they just phased out the normal grey model in favour of a golden Dolce & Gabbana version! Yep, if you get a V3i here, you'll look like you're talking into a bar of gold. Got the Motorola L7 instead (the revision of the SLVR), whose name never miss to get a chuckle out of me.

Now, today, ganymeade and ryss_rhiannon dropped by on IM, that was nice. But the rest of the day isn't so good. I'm finding out that for a foreign worker trying to rent an apartment, one thing that'd work is dropping ten grands in a bank account, to be frozen for a year. Um, no. I'm having a low, work-wise where I just feel a dark cloud of doom looming. And I hit my knee on my desk (don't do that when you have a bunch of road rashes, by the way). And I missed my bus. And I'm hungry. And there are wolves after me.

Comments

[kyotto.livejournal.com]

Heh... this reminds me of going to the Tunisian police station to get my work permit the day before I left... 8 months later... and them telling me that I can pick it up tomorrow...when I will be on a plane back to Montreal... GAAAAAAAAAA.

... and btw? Everything always works out... it's just frustrating in the mean time... hey... I am still single... I know these things lol.

*superhugs*

C.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Why even bother at that point? ;-)

[kyotto.livejournal.com]

I wanted it as a souvenir ;-)

C.

[cloquewerk.livejournal.com]

It will probably take you several months to get used to your new situation. You sound like you're going through something very similar to what I went through upon moving to the old country. I think part of the problem is what we take for granted here--you can't prepare yourself adequately for annoyance when you don't even realize what will annoy you when you get there.

But you will almost certainly get used to the way things work there, and you may even come to understand some of it... took me about 6 months to really start to feel moderately comfortable, but then I left a couple months after that. I bet if I had stayed a whole year (or at least through the summer! argh, missed the best time in Europe...) I would have felt much more at home.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Seems like my best fit might be more on the teutonic side of things (which was the time that started this whole thing), where I wouldn't be surprised that they didn't ask for much in the way of garantees for an apartment, because, really, you've engaged yourself to pay the rent, so you will, right? Anything else would be inconceivable! Just like there's no turnstiles in the metro, for example.

Here, you'd give someone half a chance to run off with living in an apartment for free, and they'd do it. Sheesh.

It all sort of makes sense, in a perverted sort of way. The ATMs have next to no feature (in most, you can find out how much money you have, and withdraw, that's it), because the French much prefer seeing the teller, they just never asked for the ATMs to do anything more. And it's been a long time that since they started depositing "paychecks" directly into accounts, so they don't open late on Thursdays, because no one has paychecks to deposit like that. You have to take a day off to get a checkbook, but that's okay, I've got 31 days a year I can take off with pay, so you just go ahead.

But the whole real estate thing is burning me out. The trick is, if you know anyone in France (say, your parents!), you're fine. If you don't, then it's a whole lot trickier (and more expensive)...

The semi-continual pain from my road rashes, hitting that knee on my desk, missing my bus (and having to walk 35 minutes to the train station, totalling an hour and a half door-to-door!) and the fact that I keep hitting my head in our attic-type studio probably come together for a grumpy pphaneuf. Really, I can't blame it all on the French!

[girlintheclouds.livejournal.com]

Aww, Pauvre Pierre!

...I hope things turn up soon! :)

[swestrup]

Wolves are fine, so long as you manage to keep them out of your pants!

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Okay, when you have wolves in your pants, you're definitely in trouble!

[gregorama.livejournal.com]

It's ok if you become a little French but just don't become Eurotrash! :-P

Hope things improve for you and give my best to Lady azrhey.

[xipetotec.livejournal.com]

Funny that you say that. A good friend of mine has been living in Poitier for two years now, and every time he comes back here to visit, he looks more European. It's kinda funny really :)

[pdage.livejournal.com]

Hum you might as well send me your IM ID so that I can pester you with useless bits of social bantering.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

It's all in my LiveJournal profile, check it out!