Impossible

In France, they have this thing called the Impossible which translates to "we're going to make this as difficult for you as possible and we're going to enjoy it". This refers to anything from taking two months to get a radiator knob so you can finally turn down the heat in your sauna apartment to having to allocate yourself at least an hour's time whenever you need to go buy stamps at the post office.

Recently, I've had some very fun Impossibles in my life. The first happened on the way to Bordeaux last week. Our train arrives at the train station so we walk up and down it to find car 6, our assigned car. We can't find car 6 so we go ask the train agent where car 6 is. She says car 6 is now car 16 so we go to car 16, find our seats and sit down. One guy comes by and says we are sitting in his seat. We say no, this is our seat because car 6 is now car 16. He walks away. Then another man comes by and says we are in his seat. We tell him the same thing but he argues back (toute en francais bien sur) until one of the other people on the train tells us that SNCF (the train company) CASUALLY, just CASUALLY, forgot half of the train, the part that had car 6, and so we were in fact in his seat. So we get off the train and go talk to the train agent who says they were searching for the missing part of the train but it should be there in about 20 minutes. An hour and a half later, the other half of the train rolls up, we get in car 6, and I collapse because I'm exhausted as this all happened at 7 am when I was running on very little sleep and definitely not in the mood for Impossibles. I love how they tried to fix the problem of the missing train by combining car 6 and 16, as if people wouldn't notice and put up a fight that people were in their seat. Impossible.

The other Impossible which has been an incredible nuisance is the French ability to close libraries when I need them most. For example, two Sundays ago I was madly trying to finish a paper due Monday at a library. I was on a paper roll, making good word count per hour time when the librarian comes up and announces that the library has to close due to "problemes d'informatiques". I had no idea what their problemes d'informatiques were but I did know that us being there, working at the library, would no way impinge on their efforts to solve les problemes. So they kicked us out which was extra super special because this, obviously, was the only library in Paris open on Sunday. And I am unable to do efficient work at my apartment (most of these blogs entries are written during apartment work procrastination).

Today, a Saturday, I had fine and dandy plans to go to the library as I have a ridiculous amount of work in the upcoming two weeks but nooooooo it's a fete du travail! So everything's closed! Impossible! Thank god that Starbucks is immune to French Impossibles or I would have gotten no work done today.

Standard paper writing procedure