Shirley was looking at amazon.com, the US site. Their telephone sockets are not the same as French ones. And why buy from America?
I would look on amazon.fr - ebay.fr - priceminister.com. Might even find one in your local supermarket or Conforama.
You can get adapters to change from the UK telephone plug to the French plug if that is what you mean rather than the mains plug.
I don't think those are suitable for France - different plug........
"Hell Pete. You've only just been made member of the month & now you want to be crowned ?"
Well Vic, no room for a crown on my head cos' the halo would get in the way....
Raining in the Haute Vienne too mate !
Bet the fish 'n chips are tasty in Torbay tho' ?
"A couple of weeks back I needed to contact the GAN about getting a crown fitted"
Hell Pete. You've only just been made member of the month & now you want to be crowned?
Sent from Rainy Torquay. Missing y'all already:-)
Sounds good Tim. A couple of weeks back I needed to contact the GAN about getting a crown fitted. I phoned the office in Ruffec (16) at 1845, by 1900 all the paperwork; dentists bills etc was exchanged by phone & email and the job was done. That's what I call efficient service ! I received my 'remboursement' a couple of days later.
And ditto for RAM/GAMEX for AE's. www.ramgamex.fr
For instance I needed an attestation for the mutuelle and instead of calling the very expensive number, it was there and just downloaded it.
You can track your reimbursements and download décomptes for the mutuelle (need to do that as had some doctor visits before everything was live with the mutuelle.)
You can even order your EHIC (French CEAM) online and the progress is tracked.
Sadly you cannot submit feuilles de soins online (they require the original :-( )
Just to say I have had a positive email experience with a French Government email this week. I had to email the CROUS who are the people who sort out the education grants, as No 2 son changed his uni choices after I had already filled out the Crous form and sent it off. I initially emailed the email on their site as there was no way to alter his grant demands on line. I sent the email on Sunday afternoon. On Monday afternoon I had an email asking what his new choices were I replied straight away. and on Tuesday got an email back saying it was being dealt with. Yesterday in the morning I had a new Notice and notification emailed to me with everything altered and correct!! Result
Sounds good Shirley, now you have the phone problem sorted it seems. You mention CPAM. It's probably a bit like teaching you granny to suck eggs but did you know you can check quite a lot of your CPAM records etc online ? Just register with them on www.ameli.fr. It can save a lot of hassle sometimes, avoiding unnecessary visits etc
We have our most regular numbers programmed into the 'phone and can see who is calling.
I have also found that if you say vous me derangez, then you get an apology and they disconnect.
We have friends who always leave their answerphone on in the evening, which is a real pain.
There are still a few available, but you can probably get a phone with built-in repondeur as cheap, or cheaper. But some only offer a pre-recorded message from an "alien". That is a bit intimidating. I like the ones where you can record your own message.
Ex-directory is absolutely right. We always were in the UK for more or less the same reason as this is about. People might be overlooking that, as usual, what is happening here in France happened roughly a decade ago in the UK. I was ex-directory from the late 1980s on because cold calls drove me nuts and man-oh-man have they increased since.
The telephone service is an ancient and inflexible system, unlike the Internet that has numerous options for dealing with spam. But I think the real problem is that the carriers make money out of these calls and are therefore reluctant to take action. To put a positive spin on it, it probably helps to keep call costs down for the rest of us, just as delivering supermarket flyers helps to safeguard the job of the local facteur.
I cannot imagine why anyone would buy as a result of any unsolicited approach, but there must be quite a few, otherwise these annoying people would give up because they wouldn't be making any money. There's none so queer as folks!
The only other option available to you is to go ex-directory, I guess.......
That is fine if you only allow the answering machine to respond to every call as you clearly do. Indeed they do not leave cold call messages. However, my OH has two jobs, one of them selling houses which means she gets calls from vendors, buyers, notaires, other agents in her network, people enquiring to have houses put on sale, SPANC, DRAC and then I go on. Then she has her real job, she receives up to 20 calls a week at least 18 of them from people she does not know. Then professionally I nowadays have a mere dozen or so a week, of which all will be from other countries.
Then as our daughters begin to have friends, despite the mobile phone industry landlines are still used. Then we have family in other countries. Bear in mind that for working people/families what you do is not often possible. You are probably in the situation where you have few enough calls to get away with it. However, even among SFN members I would hazard a guess at the working population still outweighing those who are not able to do as you do because to one extent or another we are dependent on communication.
So Mike, it is not a criticism of what you are doing but simply to remind that for those of you who can do it fine. It does not work for the rest of us.
Brian,
I was serious about the old-fashioned answering machine with a personally recorded bilingual greeting. Cold callers never leave a message. Friends and serious business callers leave messages and you can always pick-up if you recognize the voice.
Ours is a cheap free-standing Matra - not a phone with an integral repondeur. Works a treat!
The actual problem is that if all incoming (for instance) 090XXXX numbers are blocked then genuine calls go with that, other cold callers and scammers use normal network numbers which cannot be screened or else you would get no calls of any kind, ditto incoming mobile numbers. So we are between the devil and the deep blue sea. Having individual numbers blocked apparently achieves nothing because the call centres have dozens of numbers, ditto acquire new ones and drop old ones regularly to get round call blocking. Thus people are paying for something that after a short time is redundant anyway. You have Doreen and Shirley's options though, if you can see the caller number and have a list or can tell them you are a tenant you can see them off. However, with the former you then run the risk of rejecting genuine calls.
It is a no win situation and they know it, so having just the useful numbers known to you does not help because it means you will ignore the real calls on numbers you do not know. They are just doing a miserable job, we may be making a mess of things to avoid them.
I believe it is illegal to cold call anyone who has opted out, but it must be hard to enforce, especially as most of the calls come from abroad. I would like to find some way of getting blacklisted as someone who will never in any circumstances make a purchase from a telesales call.
A cruel revenge is to say "Ne quittez pas." put the handset beside the phone and leave them hanging on........
I have an answering machine with a personally recorded bilingual greeting message. This gets rid of all cold callers. My French wife can recognize a North African accent and knows instantly if it is a call centre. While we have some sympathy for those unfortunate people who have to earn their living that way, we resent their intrusion into our private lives - and we already have all the windows we need!
Because my wife still uses her maiden name, we have two entries in the annuaire and we can almost time to the minute when the same person will call for the second time.
I know that there is a way to opt out of cold calling, but I wonder if it is worth the hassle of trying to find out how it works. Does anyone have any experience of this?
What on earth did you do before the internet ? If you never did 'business on the phone' I assume you did everything by snail mail or with the body concened face to face ?
This 'social instrument' probably was the lifeline to many of us before emails etc so why knock it now ?
Just about every professional call I receive starts off with the caller/company identifying itself - it's not their fault you don't understand them. Either ask them politely to slow down ie 'doucement SVP' or something similar or just put the phone down.
I think the lack of identification at the start of a call goes back to what's been said previously about personal responsibility or lack of. If I don't recognise a number I answer the call in English - if it's someone who needs to speak to me that's usually enough to make them identify themselves, or at least the organisation they're calling from. That said, organisations who have a genuine reason for calling usually do identify themselves at the start.
If it's "Appel Masque" we simply don't answer. We have the Orange answer service and if anyone really needs to speak to us they'll leave a message.
You'll probably find that the people who speak v fast and carry on are cold callers speaking from a script - they may have the same system as some in the UK where if the call lasts a certain length of time they get paid (a bit), otherwise they don't.