It continues.

Here was the plan:

If a letter from the bank arrived today, telling me my bank card was ready to pick up, then I'd book a train back to Paris for Tuesday.

The letter arrived! "Your card is ready at your local agency, it will be there from today" So I fire up the website for the train and am about to commit when I decide I better wait until the card is in my hand and I'm sure I have no more business here in Sanary to conclude.

I rock on up to the bank, my letter and retrieval voucher ready and filled out. "Nope, it's not here", says the dude behind a tiny little display counter, whose job it is to redirect people to the ATM machines as this BANK doesn't deal with money.

"Um, what? This letter says it is available, how can I get a letter from the bank and the bank itself hasn't received it?", I ask in shaky French.

"No idea, you need to talk to your account manager. Who is on leave today. Come back Monday."

"But, but I don't have enough French to argue with you, you rat faced, incompetent loser.  How is it you can keep a job here? This isn't the first time I've seen you have no answers for a customer", I would have said, shakily, in shaky French, had I not been shaking with rage.

I tucked my coccyx back between my legs and left. Defeated once again by the Frenchman's unwillingness to look the French bureaucracy in the eye and get a job done. What's more, he's no doubt now bitching and whining about these foreigners who expect so much from him, their unreasonable demands that he concur with the directives sent out automatically by his soulless corporate head office.  Lamenting that his job will soon be replaced by a machine, like that of his bank teller compatriots.

What job? You don't have one, dickhead. I hope they turf you out on the street and you die in a fire.

Ah, feel better now. Who said blogging wasn't therapeutic.