A while back I wrote of my initial experience using “please help fr.” and promised an update, well this is a little overdue
We have been using the services of "please help" now for over eight months. John Dislins has been invaluable & the fee paid for the please help services, has paid for itself many, many times over.
Often, being able to read the fine print and ask the right questions makes a massive difference but Johns breadth of knowledge on how the system works in France, & also having allready encountered most of the problems, new arrivals come across, before, he has been able to post us in the right direction and make substantial savings both in time and money.
John has been always readily contactable and has on many occasions, translated over the phone, when we found ourselves unable to understand or be understood!
Our situation was slightly different and more complicated with one of us being born in Australia so it was not easy to find examples of what to do.
While our grasp of french is improving, dealing with authorities in france, (as with most countries) particularly over the phone often requires a special skill set, a great deal of patience and subtleties of language I am a long way off achieving (often my foreign accent is enough to cause difficulties, perhaps not encountered by locals).
John has also been able to negotiate with service providers and trades on our behalf and got much better deals than we would otherwise achieve
Another important consideration has been that we haven’t always had to keep prevailing on friends to translate, if the subject matter is too, technical, dealing with finances or other situations where confidential professional assistance is more appropriate.
On many occasions John has come up with a completely different way to handle a situation that we just would not have thought of, he is a very good listener and very easy to communicate with.
All in all using please help has been an extremely good move and probably saved us from tearing our hair out on numerous occasions,we can’t recommend John Dislins and his please help service highly enough.