Please be aware of a situation with a bank that we find ourselves in

Or Cauliflowers!

Maybe time to invest in the armaments industry or steel.

No Brian. IMO French banks are pretty poor in customer service and alway have been in the thirty years I’ve been dealing with them. It doesn’t worry me or really matter to me at all but I do think it’s true. I moved to the CCF eight years ago when HSBC took them over. I’ve actually watched as the French banker mentality was replaced by HBSC’s client culture and the results are amazing. It should be used as a case study. The staff now look pleased to see you, they want to help and they don’t try and flog you something you don’t need. I enjoy popping in there now. Whereas in Soc Gen everything was a hassle. Arrange a meeting for this, arrange a meeting for that. Pain in the neck.

Yes its very useful that there are a lot of people called Graham James and even more called James Graham, so since the French often put surnames before christian names this gets their computers in a terrible muddle particularly if like the Americans you reverse the day/month to the month/day order of your birthday too. I was James Graham born the English 03/11 or Graham James the American born 11/03!!

Anyway, since I am 'my God Graham' or 'your Graham God' I thought you were going to ask me why I created the universe? Admittedly this might run the risk of making me fall into my old habit of suffering from chronic verbal diarrhoea!

Do you have a sense of humour by the way? The Brits are supposed to be famous for laughing at themselves or their sense of the ridiculous!

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Sorry Doreen! If I am 'my God Graham' because my name is James Graham and I just wrote to you, I have to admit that I do suffer from the most appalling Chronic Verbal Diarrhoea!

Since a verb is a word expressing transitive action and a noun is intransitive and nominal, I will try to limit my replies to something more akin to the opposite to verbal diarrhoea. Shall we describe this as being symptomatic of the more conventional wisdom of most people's one or two liner messages or emails these days which you can now call....'Nominal Constipation!'

So from now on I will do my level best to be nominally constipated!

PS. thank you so much as well for describing me as '...my God Graham!'. It could be argued that the conceptual inversion of 'hell hath no fury like a woman scorned' was 'heaven hath no delight like a man flattered'. I am so glad that you have called Graham your God! You must be a remarkably good judge of character! Now I'll just have to prove to you how right you were!!!

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A friend of mine, who was born to English parents who spoke nothing but English at home, was educated in France so 100% so perfectly bi-lingual, no foreign accent in either languages. She applied for a job as a sales rep at Metro Store and got an interview. She nearly got the job but was turned down because she had no documented English certificate or diploma authorised in France proving that could speak the language! She eventually managed to get the job in the end by bringing two French witnesses to certify that she was fluent in English.

To get virtually any job in France you've got to have an authentic certificate to prove that you are officially qualified. You can't sell potatoes in a market without having an officially recognised certificate proving that you are qualified. Saying a cleaner by the way is like saying a daily. Your friend is now officially a 'Surface Technician' and in California anybody who exercises this now very honourable profession is known as a 'Domestic Engineer'.

Its as if everything has got to be square or 'carre' in a French person's mind or about as right as an up-right angle and their brains are formatted by their education.

Basically if you ask a Frenchman if he is hungry around lunchtime he'll have to look at his watch first. At one minute before 12 he'll tell you no of course not, but at one minute after 12 he'll tell you that he's starving! If you invite another Frenchman for your pool party and he dives in first, and then you ask him what the water is like, he'll have to swim to the floating thermometer first and read the temperature before being able to tell you if the water is lovely and warm or freezing cold!!

The French are world leaders in bureaucracy and France has millions and millions of laws. Every year they add on at least another hundred thousand. There are innumerable rules and regulations for everything you can possibly conceive of, so their brains must also be extremely strictly regulated by the French educational system so that they are correctly programmed to obey orders.

This is demonstrated by the fact that an English computer for instance was called an 'ordinateur' in France which is like the 'ordinator' part of a coordinator. I don't need to remind you that the ORD syllable basis of an ORD-inateur in French came from the word ORD-er. This is because it was quite impossible for the French not to conceive of this machine, when it was first invented, as not being designed to give them ORD-ers as if this was a new electronic version of their own bureaucracy. In retrospect one has to admit that for once the French might have got it right!

English of course owes a lot to the French as a result of the NORM-an invasion which why we now also have to endure so many NORM-al NORM-s. This French REG-ime whose REG-ent was the king who controlled his REG-ions, is why we still have so many REG-ulations that all seem so REG-ular quite apart from the very ORD-inary sound of ORD-ers. This is why NORM-s sound so NORM-al, REG-ulations were REG-ular and ORD-ers were so ORD-inary and why you are probably such a normal, ordinary, regular and hence orderly kind of person because you obey to the letter all norms, orders and regulations!

Making a word like to be 'ordinary' synonymous with an authoritarian order, is the oldest subliminal trick in the book. Again its all part of one's education. Even languages can give orders because they are used to order the mind. So if you don't obey orders you won't be ordinary and you will soon be guilt of the crime of disorderly conduct. Why must you so dutifully pay a 'duty' or why is it customary to pay custom's duties? Supposing the government was just steeling your money and you didn't want to dutifully pay a customary custom's duty, why wasn't this duty called a 'theft' and why don't you claim that you have no 'duty' whatsoever to pay it because its just another criminal government protection racket!

When I was young I used to go to 'gay Paris'. Well now there are an awful lot of gay people in the Marais region but not everywhere in the whole of Paris which you can't call gay any more. Why did homosexuals call themselves 'gays?' Well the answer is obvious because to be a 'gay' means to be a 'happy' not a 'sad' or another pejorative term. When I get picked up by a gay I just answer 'sorry old chap, I'm neither a gay nor a happy I'm afraid, I'm just a miserable old hetrosexual!'

Anyway don't forget Doreen to call cleaners 'surface technicians!'

Who is Graham Doreen? Or have you dozed off again..... :)

Well done James.

Veronique, you have hit the nail on the head, I salute you...'strength and honour gladiateur in the Survive France Colosseum'
sorry I mean ‘glatiateuse’ (Russel Crowe speaks very bad French!)

You replied positively to my short half-joking tongue-in-cheek essay about Glyn Ward’s now world famous 50 euros in cash that mysteriously disappeared down a bank deposit slide, designed for clients who give them wads of cash without even getting a receipt! Glyn is quite right, it’s a crazy system when one comes to think of it.

Clearly the no-proof-of-deposit system is flawed from the client’s point of view, but not of course the bank’s which can never make a proven error and the system is even more to their advantage apparently because the money was supposed to be counted by an external ‘security firm’. Even if it could be proven that the cash was stolen by counting the money and posting this in its sealed envelope, whilst filming this with a mobile, the beauty of the system for the bank is that they can blame the security firm and vice versa. But, the bank has apparently made a proven error. The money that was obviously erroneously deducted from the account was then re-credited and this has serious implications. Fatal, check mate!

This is their Achilles’ heel. Banks are like the French administration, even if they make a mistake they can never admit to this. Its still like a throwback to the old royal ‘droit regalien’ system when the accusation that the Sun King was wrong would cost you your head in two seconds flat. But, how come the correct sum of money was deducted from Glyn’s account? Who could possibly wish to deduct a sum of cash if, as they claim, this did not even exist inside the sealed envelope? This was a grave error, compounded by the fact that the bank inexplicably or conveniently changed its mind by firstly saying there was no money in the envelope, then deducting this from the account. Even the bank manager changed his mind by saying that there was money and then there wasn’t! This does not wash.

How in any court of law, could a judge vindicate a bank or security firm employee for having deducted the correct sum instead of zero which would of course have meant neither a credit nor a debit, hence no change whatsoever in the account? No, this one smells more than very fishy. It stinks. In all probability they are covering their butts, amateurishly getting muddled-up with their conflicting story lines because they are trying to conceal the money’s disappearance, which was there.

I implicitly believe Glyn. Why on earth would he tell us this story if it wasn’t true. Nil motivation. The debit that was then reversed reveals a number of likely hypotheses. If the security or bank person who allegedly stole the money was contacted and told that the client was complaining, because the account had not been credited, his first line of defence was already breached.

1. In many cases a missing small or paltry sum might not even have been noticed by the client and this is even more likely if Glyn was a holiday-maker or just had a holiday home here and was already back in England perhaps not even getting to see his statement for months till he came back to the house and found them in the letter box. I have dozens of debits and credits in 4 monthly statements from the same bank, all being professional or personal accounts, and as far as the personal accounts are concerned, frankly I usually just scan them quickly, mainly to check if there was an unrecognisable large payment made.The fact is that for Glyn this was a crucially important payment to make, maybe last month’s bills had to be paid, even if this was just 50 euros it was nevertheless a vital sum.

2. The second line of defence would be the fact that this was apparently a small sum. Thieves often opt for the longer-term cumulative method of steeling lots of small value items instead of one big one. The smaller the theft the greater its invisibility. Clearly if the sealed envelope had been deposited by the bank coming from a large or well-known company for a much bigger sum, the thief would avoid steeling this, there being the risk of a very real or serious investigation, and the money might have been counted and sealed by more than one company employee. I had a building firm based at my home here for years, which my own company also developed. Employees, of which there were many, usually stole lots of tiny little things. Half a box of screws or a panel pin hammer or things like angle-grinder discs and screwdrivers would gradually disappear over a long period of time. But the theft of 20-30 euros worth of several little bits and pieces every day throughout the year still added up to a tidy sum by the end of the year.

3. The third line of defence would be the fact that the money could have been handled by two companies or at least their respective employees may have both had access to this. As I said above, this conveniently enables the bank to blame the security firm and vice versa. This line of defence is exactly what I experienced having several employees again all working on the same building site. Its impossible to point the finger of blame at anybody specifically, because if it wasn’t Jean it could have been Pierre or Paul, and woe betide any employer who accuses an employee of theft without irrefutable evidence. Furthermore, in France even with irrefutably witnessed evidence, and I have also experienced this, it is impossible to sack them unless this accusation has also been proven to be correct and vindicated in a court of law. And, if the employer was rightly or wrongly deemed to have made a false accusation, heaven help him!

4. The thief’s fourth line of defence is that quite frankly (since we are living in the land of the Franks) who on earth would wish to lock horns or take one of France’s biggest clearing banks to court over an issue involving a tiny sum? And furthermore, if Glyn was living in the French countryside or in a small market town, even the average lawyer would think twice about getting a reputation for taking on such a big and powerful institution. The French are far more hierarchically orientated than the Brits. They are scared of criticising superiors without at least a union to provide them with protection, which makes a lot of good sense because in France it’s the management that is scared out of their wits by the unions! If you own a company that has 10 or more employees you are doomed, because this means that there must legally be a ‘syndicat’ commissar who will take over total control of your work force and you can't go broke unless the employees are all reemployed elsewhere, or paid substantial compensation, which is your own legal responsibility.

Never make the mistake in believing that a French union has anything to do with a British one. Grave error again. A union or ‘syndicat’ boss in your company is an erstwhile commissar like a communist party delegate in the USSR prior to Perestroika. If you don’t understand what this means, go and rent Dr Zhivago again then you’ll get the gist!

My plumber who was shot in the knee at Carcassonne, when a military spectacle went seriously wrong because one of the soldiers used live ammunition instead of blank bullets. Well, I can tell you for a fact that local lawyers were at first hesitant to take on the case against the almighty French army. But, even if the victims officially paid one, in reality the first lawyer they found was really defending the army to get them off the hook ASAP, with a minimum amount of fuss and bother, which also means at the least cost and with the least publicity.

There are cases that a lawyer can lose and hence further his career, there are others that he can win and his career will stop-dead in its tracks. This is just like the lawyer who can take your case via the long route through tribunals and high courts, which he knows will increase your chances of losing but also conversely increase his fees. Or, he can take you via the short route which will increase your chances of winning, but only enable the lawyer to take a small fee in comparison. Be very careful before you chose your lawyer, the second oldest profession in the world! The long route for a criminal lawyer in the UK defending somebody on legal aid could net him half a million, so it’s a serious strategic decision for him!

So lets abandon the hypotheses and just be generous again and give the bank another chance to make sure that this never happens again. One way to do this might be to turn the event into a readable newspaper article. But the trouble is there’s no proof of any other cash deposit either belonging to Glyn or any other customer. The banks have already taken this into consideration. And again, local newspapers often don’t like writing about issues that are too contentious that could aggravate the powers that be. This applies to ones like the Midi Libre, the La Depeche or the l’Independent. I know a journalist there who repeatedly told me this.

Were it not for this weak link in the chain, the bad publicity effect might quickly encourage the bank to limit cash deposits to either the old fashioned way, where the bank teller also counts the notes, or a machine that does this which they already have inside certain branches, but not outside I believe so its mainly just a queue shortening exercise. Of course in the event of a dispute, if the money was always counted by a bank employee or better still two, this would have to occur in a place that was equipped with a security camera in the event of any dispute.

In fact this is probably a place to start. Ask the bank to check their security camera recordings, and if they don’t have one, express utter astonishment at this blatant incomprehensible lack of security. Then ask the bank to explain how stringently they positively vet their staff handling these cash deposits and also how they do due diligence by crosschecking and verifying the positive vetting of any outside security firm.

Already just by asking these kind of pertinent or salent questions for a seeming nothingness sum of money, this will activate alarm bells. When they smell that this ridiculous bit of nonsense could get more serious, they won’t like it at all. Remember they are already in trouble because of the ludicrously incompetent way that they have already treated the case. Beware of a minor error, they can dangerously snow ball into an avalanche. Any pilot will tell you this about a tiny little seemingly unimportant technical problem during a flight. It could cause the plain to crash by having exponential repercussions.

Every single communication MUST be sent in writing to the bank (make sure its in good French or they could say that the letters were in incomprehensible Franglais) so the ‘lettre recommandee’ also has an ‘accuse de reception’. Any kind of verbal communication face-to-face or on the phone in France is utterly worthless. They say in French ‘les paroles s’envolent’ or literally ‘words fly away!’ These letters and their replies will start the process of either writing the article or a court case or both which could be even better. If, or when the bank does not reply, you must write again and again, always being an AR letter (accuse de reception, lettre recommendee) until you finally get a response. If there is no response your next letter will make note of their refusal to reply which will be in contravention of another law which obliges them to do so. There is bound to be a law about this.

The trouble is, all this will cost money if only sending recommended letters with a legal requirement to send Glyn a signed receipt. And the lawyers fees has to be taken into consideration if Glyn looses his case. This is the reason why the bank and the alleged thief is again on a much safer wicket. Who on earth would bother to take the risk for a paltry sum of money? So it’s primarily a matter of principal.

Practically every conceivable thing you ever do in France is controlled by one of their 4 to 5 million laws. You will never understand the French unless you realise that they are shocked and horrified unless all forms of liberty are totally controlled by a Tsunami of rules and regulations. The French word ‘bureau’ before the ‘cracy’ that became the compound word ‘bureaucracy’ exists in practically every language in the world, and they have circa four times more bureaucrats than any other industrialised nation, which costs 57% of their GDP which is totally non-productive economically. Only 43% is left that could be describe as being linked to the eventual creation of a real annual profit.

Anyway, if Glyn continues on this vein, the bank will probably quickly decide to write-off their circa 50 euro debt and pay him just to shut up. But Glyn might decide to not stop there. This is because if the CA pay you, this is tantamount to an admission of their guilt. Even guilty men must always act legally as if they were 100% innocent. NEVER sign any document even if this was in recognition that they had compensated you for what will probably be described as a so-called ‘computer error.’ Haha, its always the computers fault and never a human being! This is because as you build your case against them you will also be timing hour-by-hour the work that you have dedicated to this financial reparation that has caused you so much personal and mental aggravation. You will need to be compensated seriously for this loss of productive time and energy and its devastating negative psychological impact!

A no win situation!

Not according to people I know who are looking. Not a lot of difference.

I think it's now very difficult wherever you are, Louise :-O

Do you think it is easier to find a job in the UK? I am wondering this myself.

Hi Glyn, just had a thought...have you thought about ringing CA Britline. We had a big problem with our local CA branch as they had duplicated a bank transfer to England for 6000 euros therefore putting us in the red for 4000 euros and when we went to do a bank transfer back we were out of pocket to the tune of 400 euros due to fees, currency discrepencies and God knows what so I phoned CA Britline and they sorted it all out for us...took a few weeks but we got back everything and CA then refunded our original bank transfer fee as well. Was very pleased with their work....how about giving them a ring????

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Strangely, across Europe I am used to people who will claim that the English are the only people who will ever complain properly - by writing instead of moaning among friends.

Strange, when I took the Bac exam, I don't remember having - ever - had cleaning lessons ! :)

Well, all is said. Very true, sadly.

I can attest of all that through experience too. Hot potato system, no ownership of any problem : isn't it easier that way ? Most people don't complain because it's hard to get anywhere, And so they give up easily. That's when people take the piss.

The French do know that the Brits don't usually complain, so...

If you complain "mildly" - with courtesy, that is - which I always do, at first, anyway - you rarely get anywhere. Once I warned my husband that if I didn't get anywhere in a shop, I'd complain the "French" way : shouting, spelling the truth outloud (takes some nerves ) ! It happened after the shop assistant called me a lier ! Well, It worked wonders :)

I had some money go missing at crédit mutuel de bretagne too, nothing in the envoloppe when they received it (by post - so it was possible that someone had taken it BUT unlikely!) small amount of money but I was a student at the time and it mattered to me, something I had to put down to experience, live and learn and all that!

Isn't Brecht always?

I'm simply looking at it as somebody who has had an account in credit become exactly the same amount overdrawn a couple of decades back. There were no transactions, just their bookkeeping. It was never resolved because they would not climb down, I certainly had to 'forfeit' my money and just let it go. Fortunately it seems to have 'vanished' when that bank were taken over by one of the other big ones.