Thursday, March 4, 2010

Exposé

You remember I wrote about our useless experience at the Pole Emploi (French employment agency) the other day? And Eric described it in more detail than I had the stomach for.

It was all under the guise of trying to find out how we can work as musicians here. Now I can reveal, we were actually doing undercover work.

Everything came out in the newspaper yesterday when Le Populaire revealed that employees of the Pole Emploi are badly trained and unable to handle the number of confused people they have to deal with every day. They lack anything but the most basic ability to log people into the system. Some of them have even gone on strike to call attention to the situation.

Just call us the unemployed man's Monsieur Woodward and Madame Bernstein.

7 comments:

Erica M said...

Too cool! Of course, over here, incompetence is revealed without secret investigation.

amy said...

Ah yes, that all-important transparency. Without even a veil of competence to mislead anyone.

the fly in the web said...

Depressing, isn't it when you could probably sort the whole thing out yourselves in a couple of days if you weren't oblige to engage with theswe halfwits.

Ed Ward said...

Eric's is one of the most coruscating depictions of French bureaucracy I've read, but very likely dead accurate.

You might want to wish your blog-spam (above) gospeed, though.

amy said...

No, don't tell me it's spam, Ed - I see those characters and I think "there's someone far far away who wants to communicate with me but it turns out looking like...this". Sort of like people who think they see UFO's. (she says, rushing to the dictionary to look up "coruscating").

tfitw, I did get to speak to a woman from the Conseil General whose job it is to help people navigate the system, and she actually seemed helpful. As to whether she can achieve anything other than the basic "first call this person, then fill out this form on line", I'm not sure.

Ed Ward said...

I will not be responsible for your computer if you click on those dots...

amy said...

That did it for me Ed - cause all of a sudden a little voice in my head kept saying "click on those dots, c'mon - just to see what happens" and I didn't want to do anything that stupid.