Papers Arrive, Finally

Believe it or not, I finally got the papers from France I asked for. But this was after they told me

• to talk to somebody else (about 8 times)
  
• that I should come in person during office hours (to which I had to reply no, being 3000 km and an ocean away)
  
• that to find information would take a VERY long time (which it did: nine weeks to talk about how long it would take, one afternoon for them to finally do it)
  
• that this would be way too expensive (whatever that means: is that "way to expensive for them" or "way to expensive for me" ?)
  
• that I had to write them an official letter with international return stamps before they could even consider my request (which I did, only to have them return me that letter in the mail 4 weeks later without the documents I asked for in the said letter ...)
  
• that they didn't have this information (about 12 times)
  
• that they didn't know where to find this information (about 3 times)
  
• that they never got this information
  
• that they hadn't kept this information on file
  
• that they didn't give out this kind of information
  
• that they had nothing to do with this sort of information (about 3 times)
  
• that they did not provide this kind of service to former students (about six times)
  
• that they didn't and had never done this sort of thing and that they didn't care if the same office at other universities did and that it was outrageous of me to even assume that they would do it
  
• that I should write them an e-mail (I wrote about 8, only to find out that in French administration e-mail is neither read nor replied to)
  
• that this was not possible (about 16 times)

When I finally got the papers, I received nothing less than three exemplaries, from two different sources. And amazingly enough, exactly the information I had been solliciting all along (which they swore they didn't have) copied, signed and stamped by them (even if they obviously couldn't do it). Let me remind you that what I was asking for was transcripts of my grades from the university. I had never managed to get them while I was a student and living in France because French universities don't automatically grant you this, unless a third party requests it. One would think they feared the education system would collapse if students were allowed to receive knowledge or proof of their performance. But anyway, I now am at a point where a third party is indeed requesting my (until now under disclosure) transcripts.

The disappointing part of this story is that after all my sweating to be polite, amiable, presentable, use the right courtesy addresses and spell out everything in good French, nothing happened until I lost my temper, yelled back at the clerks on the phone, swore and insulted them, asked them what nonsense they were telling me, told them how incapable they were and how much I regretted ever having laid foot on their soil. Like I said, three days later, the required documents came to me with the mail!

So much for my faith in the old, proper values of the Europeans. In fact, as it happens, there’s nothing like being abusive. Apparently, rudeness works wonders …