Who has time for this nonsense?
Thursday, 28 November 2002
The French appear to have an authoritative, Five Year Plannish streak running through their society. I base this sweeping generalization on three observations:
1. The French have a National Police, which imparts the willies even to those Americans who are not card-carrying NRA members, ever vigilant for black helicopters and ATF storm troopers.
2. The French do not have individual, freestanding parking meters. Instead, there are a number of Central Parking Devices on every block, each of which holds sway over a half-dozen or so parking spaces. The mechanism for operating these devices remains a mystery to me, but it involves the feeding in of coins, the dispensing of a ticket, and the sacrifice of personal liberties. It is also, obviously, a means to enlist the masses in an effort to police themselves. After all, if you tape a bogus "meter broken" sign to one meter in the States, you're likely to get away with it. In France, if you tape a "Device de Parkings C'est Morte" sign to a CPD, any one of a half-dozen drivers might rat you out, lest they be caught up in the conspiracy.
3. The washing machines and dryers in French laveries do not have their own coin slots. Rather, each machine is tied to a Central Laundering Unit located somewhere in the launderette. You stuff your clothes into a washer or dryer, make note of its number, then proceed to the Central Laundering Unit, where you punch in that number. The panel on the CLU informs you of the cost of operating the washer or dryer, and you must then feed the appropriate coins into the CLU's authoritative slot. To tell the truth, this is kind of fun, in a geeky way, but it's positively Soviet, too. And if the CLU crashes, the entire launderette is down for the count.
But there is hope, a spark of individualism, of liberty, egality and fraternity, and it burns brightly in Surcouf.
Surcouf is three floors of computer hardware and software. Laptops, desktops, palmtops, monitors, software, CD-ROMs, MP3 players, bags, paper, disks of all consistencies and dimensions, USB hubs, UPS boxes, plugs and adapters and wires and cables, Macs and Compaqs and Belkins, oh my, all presented in a Big Top environment complete with Ringling Brothers lettering on all the signs.
I had on my shopping list a USB hub, as part of my extensive research for a forthcoming essay on the topic of you just try to daisy-chain 127 devices together and plug them into a 3-pound laptop, you maroon (hey, you didn't think I just made this stuff up off the top of my head, did you?). I found the hub, and a new sleeve for my Sony PDA, and a plastic thing to neaten the Medusa's hairdo of cables "connecting" my laptop to its various peripherals ("connecting" as in "entangling," not "facilitating communication"), and a power strip.
I collected these items as I walked through three floors of laptops, desktops, palmtops, monitors, software, CD-ROMs, MP3 players, bags, paper, disks of all consistencies and dimensions, UBS hubs, UPS boxes, plugs and adapters and wires and cables, Macs and Compaqs and Belkins, oh my, and then proceeded to the checkout counter.
Silly Americaine!
After waiting in the checkout line for 20 minutes, and exchanging several dozen mutually incomprehensible words with the clerk, I developed the vague suspicion that the process of buying merchandise and leaving with it was somehow more complicated than it had first appeared. After leaving the line and exchanging mutually incomprehensible words with several other Surcouf employees, I determined that the purchasing procedure was as follows:
1. Examine merchandise.
2. Decide upon (eventual) purchase.
3. Indicate selection to clerk at computer terminal in closest proximity to intended purchase.
4. Receive printed ticket which looks like cash register receipt but, a-ha!, is not.
5. Depart with ticket, and intended purchase, which clerk has put in a shopping bag.
Okay, stay with me here. At this point, you have what looks like a receipt, and a piece of merchandise which is in a shopping bag, and you still have five steps to go.
6. Repeat steps 1 through 5 as often as required until all desired merchandise has been obtained, along with tickets for each, in a shopping bag.
7. Proceed to checkout. Proffer pieces of paper that look like receipts, present shopping bag for inspection.
8. Purchases are totaled. Tender to clerk your money and pieces of paper that look like receipts but are not. Receive piece of paper that is receipt but does not look like one, along with the bag holding merchandise.
9. Proceed from checkout, through merchandise area, to exit, where security guard enters transaction number from piece of paper that does not look like a receipt but is, verifying purchase has been paid for.
10. Exit, drooling, into the cool Parisian night, secure in the knowledge that at Surcouf, at least, every aisle of merchandise is free and autonomous, beholden to none, only loosely bound in a confederation with the checkout clerks and with the crack security forces which, were the cash registers moved 20 feet closer to the doors, would be entirely unnecessary.
© copyright 2003 Mark J. McGarry