Tuesday, October 6, 2015
The word bavure --a feminine noun, means a blunder in French.
That is the best way to describe the issue of my order of a retractable awning from Lapeyre, the high-end home furnishing company.
Lapeyre is a division of Saint Gobain, one of France's top companies.
Neither the association with Saint Gobain, nor Lapeyre's expensive offerings guarantee against blunders by the sales and service people, as I learned to my fury this morning.
At about 11:00 a.m. Monsieur Xavier Dubot, the man who installed the awning last Friday, came by to show me how the remote control for the awning worked. This is a top-of-the line awning, with a strip of lighting to light it at night, sensors to retract the awning when the wind is too high, a sensor to unfurl the awning when the sunlight requires it. It sounds like a wonderful product, but when Monsieur Dubot unfurled the awning he installed, it became apparent that the awning was far too short to provide any sort of cover for the terrace.
Monsieur Lacena at the store sold me the awning whose measurements were taken by M. Dubot and passed on to M. Lacena.
Something fell between the cracks, and of course, no one took responsibility.
The installation had to be completed before I left, and now the removal of the awning fabric and its replacement with a longer bolt and the attachment of two longer bars to provide the needed length will all have to take place while I am away.
Fortunately, my neighbor who will be supervising the work on the attic will be able to let Monsieur Dubot in the house. Monsieur Dubot says he has never done a replacement, but "he knows how to do it".
I think he can, but what choice do I have? As the awning is now, I have essentially spent about $5,000 to illuminate the terrace in the evening.
The experience summarizes what is wrong with France today: everyone does things as they think best, and no one takes responsibility for the consequences.
Beautiful country, incredibly disorganized, prone to bavures.
***
Update:
I consulted my friend at La Marbrerie about what to do about the mess of the stor bann project, and she gave me good advice:
"You have to make a big stink. You have to tell them you are a lawyer, and you will not let them get away with their mistake. You cannot let them take you for some little old lady they can take advantage of. See it you can still stop the check you gave them Friday, and if not, go to the store tomorrow and every day after that, and demand to see the person in charge of the entire store --and say you will not leave until you are given a rendezvous.
Do not let up the pressure. Otherwise, they'll string you along, thinking you'll be leaving and they will not have anyone to back you up. If you don't, they'll just figure, 'She's an American, she's alone, she won't be back for quite some time' --and when you come back, they'll say it's been too long for you to make any claim."
I took my friend's advice and called the salesman as soon as I got back. I raised my voice and told him I would not accept his attempt to pin the blame for the delivery of the wrong product on me. What is more, I pointed out that any interference with the product as delivered to me and installed would nullify the 5 year guarantee. I told him I was a lawyer and would pursue all my remedies, all of this said in a hard voice. After a few seconds of this, he became exasperated and told me,
"I don't know how things go in the United States, but in France we do not speak to a sales person as though he were a dog."
And then the line went dead.
Five minutes later, the salesman called me to tell me that he would have the awning installed taken down and the same day, have an awning appropriate to the measurement of my terrace installed. I would merely pay the difference between the two products.
All this will take until November, certainly, and supervision of it will be one more task for Chantal to take on. However, I have to believe that the salesman fully intends to make the exchange --although I will be much more careful about turning over a check for the balance than I was on Friday.
***
Until this morning's surprise about the awning, I was actually planning to write about the fad for keeping chickens that is sweeping France. I actually think poor service and the lack of a work ethic are kissing cousins with the phenomenon of self-sufficiency and decroissance beloved of neo-ruraliens, back-to-the-land types and their friends who are keeping chickens. It is very French to take an idea to its logical extreme and try to put it into practice. Unfortunately, the results are not always encouraging; but my observation is that, the French, once committed, can do nothing but keep defending the choice they made, as changing course would be an admission of error. And, as the Lapeyre sales representative's reaction to anger at his incompetence demonstrates, the French cannot bear to be criticized.
The man who installed the awning keeps chickens, my cleaning lady and her husband keep chickens, my neighbor across the way keeps chickens, the people up the road keep chickens. I asked the installer why doing so was so popular in France and he told me that many French had seen a program showing how industrial egg farming is carried out in France:
The chickens never range, they lay until they die and when they die their corpses are not even taken out of the cage because it's uneconomical! The French love animals, so many started keeping chickens themselves after that.
Nice explanation, although I've noticed that there is at least one general circulation magazine about how to keep chickens on newsstands fanning the trend. Then again, I also think the idea of eggs from free-range chickens is certainly appealing.
However, such eggs can be purchased at "bio" supermarkets, of which there are plenty, even in a backwater like l'Aude. "No", I think the real reason the French are going mad for chickens is that by doing so they can have cheaper "organic" eggs as well as satisfying a need to seem to be self-sufficient.
That need to be seen to be self-sufficient is a very strong impulse in many French nowadays. The philosophy of decroissance --a kind of 21st century Luddism-- holds that globalization can be defeated if everyone will only consume less of that which is mass-produced, produce more themselves and scale down their wants. Foraging for edible plants is part of this trend, and the French have always gone hunting for mushrooms, so this is just an extension of that tradition. France has also always permitted gleaning that left behind after any kind of harvest, so tradition supports that trend --although it's usually the poorest people who do it.
In my view, the philosophy of self-sufficiency that the French are now embracing is their response to the failure of French institutions. The French don't think their government does anything other than advance the self-interest of their representatives and as a result, they have turned their backs on participation in politics, with the exception of union members, who are entrenched in France's political life.
So everyone does for themselves: home repair companies like Monsieur Bricolage, Brico Depot and others do a nice business in DYI repair products, some people produce their own wine, everyone has a vegetable garden. Some people get by on very little, supplementing a government payment with odd-jobs done for cash, not fixing up the house, not having a television or land line or WiFi, buying second-hand items, using an IPhone for all purposes of communication.
This is the French way: radically individualistic, more so actually, than the American. In my own view this strategy will neither defeat globalization nor lead to a better French society, but its opposite: a society where it's sauve qui peut (every man for himself) and the next generation is worse, not better off, than this one.
Funnily enough, I don't think what the French seeking auto-suffisance are doing is anything like what Thoreau sought when he went to Walden Pond, although, superficially, it may seem so. I think what Thoreau went to Walden Pond to seek was a respite from materialism and to make a statement that the world can be too much with us, to paraphrase Wordsworth. However, Thoreau returned from Walden Pond, while the average Frenchman seems to want to live there forever.
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