Our Life in France Guest Post – work

When we lived in France, we had to keep our carte de séjour (the equivalent of a green card) up to date.  Carl’s allowed him to work (obviously), but mine did not, so I asked him to write a post about what it was like to work in France.  This is what he had to say:

First rule of work …. don’t forget to walk around the office each morning upon arrival and shake hands with everyone …. everyone you see.  Also, remember who you see, because if you forget and try to shake their hand again, you will humiliate them and embarrass yourself.  At the last moment they will pull their hand away and ask if you’ve already met for the day.  Now you, and Kathy, know why I liked to be one of the first ones to work each morning.  That way everyone came by to shake my hand each and every morning, instead of me taking forever to go around shaking theirs.  (As hard as I tried I was never able to be the first to arrive  and was never the last to leave work.)   I can’t vouch for the validity of this but I think someone told me the custom developed from the wars in France.  They shake your hand to see if you have a weapon.  Believe me, this hand shaking thing was some serious stuff.  It still is.  Now, imagine, my French was not too good in the beginning and everyone who has learned another language knows there are familiar and formal pronouns.  I caught heck more than once from my French colleagues after using the familiar “tu” when the big boss came around shaking hands each morning instead of the formal “vous”.

Counter to what anyone might think about the French and their experiment with the 35 hour work week, the French I worked with and around had an amazing work ethic.  They were (are) a bunch of truly hard working individuals.

One thing you quickly learn about the French is they like to debate, discuss,  and over-analyze everything.  In fact it can really get out of control.  I remember one meeting where two Frenchmen were arguing … sorry, debating, a hot issue.  Towards the end, these two were really at each other.  I thought they were going to come to blows; I was shocked.  Well, at the end of the meeting one says to the other “lets go get a cup of coffee”.  It was like it never happened.  I would have held a grudge for weeks.

Being on “Expat” status while working in France meant I received a salary in French francs.  In France, income taxes are handled very differently than in the US.  They didn’t take income taxes out of each paycheck.  I had to be careful and set aside some money each month.  I also didn’t calculate what my taxes were.  At the end of the year, I filled out a bi-fold form and sent it to the tax office.  A short time later,  I received a bill in the mail for the taxes I owed.  Hopefully I had set aside enough to cover it.  I always thought that was why we received 2 paychecks for December for a total of 13 for the year.

Except for the few individuals I really got to know and became friends with, work was for the most part very formal.  I never called my boss by his first name –  it was always Monsieur Dailliez, and he always called me by my last name as well.  For some reason he always had something to say about American cheese …. Easy Cheese in the pressurized can, that is.  Finally I’d had enough and called my mom and asked her to buy a couple of cans and mail them to me.  Now I was ready for the next time my boss came around talking about “fromage en bombe”.  I told him I had something for him and when I opened my desk drawer and  pulled out one of the cans, he was a little surprised, to say the least.  I finally talked him into letting me squirt a little pile of pasteurized American cheese on the end of his finger.  I can still remember his face as he tasted one of America’s great culinary experiences.  There was no need to worry though, one of my French colleagues got me back one day by bringing in “paté de tete”.  I was expecting something like “foie gras”, nice and smooth, but what I got was chunky.

I was lucky enough to work at a location that had a restaurant in a separate building on the plant site.  It had a full time chef.  It was where I really came to love French cooking …. NOT.  Real French cooking didn’t always make my mouth water especially once I found out what it was.  Lamb brain and calf’s head did not become my perennial favorites.  The chef would always tease “les americans,” saying we only ate the best parts of the animal and threw the rest away.

With all that said, make no mistake about it, the job I had in France has been one of the best experiences of my career.

(Please note that this post reflects our experience in the early 1990’s – I can’t speak for what anyone would experience today.)