It's really too painful to relive french bureaucratic nightmares, but this one is kind of funny.Turns out that in order to work in France (and live here longer than 3 months), you need to get a carte de sejour. We ended up having to go to Chicago to get a visa, but that was just a 3 month visa (we basically needed to reapply once we arrived in France). So it turns out that we need to walk over to the Prefecture for Alsace (fortunately, it's a 5 minute walk from our apartment), take a ticket, stand in line, and get this huge stamp in our passports.
My experience at the prefecture was not the best. Seeing that the hours were from 8:30AM to 4:00PM, I decided that I would go at 3:30PM so that the little bureaucrats would be motivated to efficiently finish their work and go home. Unfortunately, when I arrived, they said that they were all out of tickets (in fact, they ran out at 11:00AM that day). Trying to clarifying whether this meant that they just ran out of paper, or that they only give a certain number of tickets out each day - I learned that it was the latter. Lesson #1: Just because they say they're open until 4:00PM, doesn't really mean that they're open until 4:00PM.
Returning a few days later, I arrived early at 8:00AM to make sure I was at the front of the line and I could get in and out quickly. When I arrived outside the Prefecture, there were actually five lines (still never figured out why), they had already started to let people in, and when I eventually got my number I was 32. Lesson #2: Just because they say they're open at 8:30AM, doesn't really mean that they're open at 8:30AM.
While waiting in line (the average customer took 15 minutes), I finally got to the window almost three hours later. It ended up taking only 60 seconds (I don't think she even made eye contact with me). Considering this window is the only window for this stamp, and you have to have received a letter saying that you're paperwork is done, I never quite got the reason for the 15 minute sessions - since I'm sure my french was the worst of all of them.
When Patrick and Joe went to the Prefecture, they had some other challenges - namely after waiting an hour, Joe realized that he had lost his ticket. By the time he got another one there were an additional 50 people in front of him. In the end I think they ended up acting like a couple and just went up together at the same time.
In the final chapter, we end with Jim and Theresa. They were the last ones to go to the Prefecture, and they also wait in line for hours. When they reach the window, the bureaucrat says, "Oh, you're with Lilly, we've been expecting you, so you didn't need to wait in line."
These are the days that I appreciate the Germans.
