rant: that's life in the big city

When I was young, my mom used to tell me "That's life in the big city" a lot, as a nice way of telling me to shut up and get over whatever situation I was complaining about. Life in the big city thus became synonymous with disagreeable but inevitable situations, and I therefore never had any great ambition to run away and live the big city life.

Nonetheless, have now lived in several big cities.   And with mom a whole continent away, I can complain as much as I want about life therein. The current big city in question is, of course, Paris, and my complaints run along these lines: the people are rude, the air is dirty, the vegetables suck, and everything is so frigging expensive! ( But that's life in the big city.)

There are a lot of positives to city living.  First and foremost is public transportation:  lots of walking, low carbon footprint, being able to do your makeup while commuting.  (And read here about why city living is greener than you think - if The Economist is saying it, it must be true!)  And then the every-day-of-the-week free concerts film festivals fireman's cookoffs farmer's markets new shoe shops 800 yoga studios, etc., aren't to be sniffed at either.  So even though I read Jamie Oliver's Jamie at Home and weep over all the vegetables I can't plant in our apartment's garden, I mostly don't mind life in the big city.  (I'd like to mention that in the  aforementioned book, pasty-english Jamie is actually quite cute here picking caterpillars off lettuce in knitwear.)

But today is one of the days when I hate life in the big city.  

Today I went to renew my residence permit at city administration.  I knew from the start that this was going to be no picnic:  Benoît and I got up at 4 am in order to be at the administration by 5 am, to wait in line at the gates to be sure to get a good number/ticket.  (Can someone say appointment system?  please?)  By six-thirty, over 150 people were behind me in line.  I was the first female in line, so as soon as Benoît left for work, several men who saw me as the line-jumping opportunity of the century blatantly cut in front of me.  (Lucky for me, I've been in this situation before, and I know the solution:  a simple, shocked, "Don't touch me!" loud enough for the rest of the line to hear, and they scatter back to their spots, indicating to the watching public with exaggerated gestures that I'm obviously crazy.)

At 9 am, we are given numbers and let inside.  I get number 42 out of 300.   Inside the building, there are lots of different lines and waiting rooms, and everything is completely unmarked.  Imagine the DMV with zero signage.    It's total pandemonium, with hundreds of people running in all directions.  My little group of card-renewers who has been there since 5 am stalls: we don't know which room we are supposed to go into.  We show our numbers to a guy standing in the doorway of the first waiting area and ask if it's the card renewal area.  He says no, it's for driver's licenses, and that card renewal people wait in the general area with everybody else.  So off we go, and settle into the general waiting area.  I happily dig in to All the Pretty Horses.  (Fantastic, fantastic book.)  About 45 minutes later, I look up from the book, and make eye contact with the guy who had told us where to wait. He is breezing down the hall to a processing window, card renewal application in hand.  I go back into that first room, and it was, in fact, a special area for card renewals.   A woman waiting in the back tells  me that you have to wait in this area first to exchange your number for a new number.   She tells me that they're onto number 156.  I walk up to the desk, leading my posse of 5am-ers and brandishing my number 42 to the crowd, who are yelling "You missed your turn!  Come back next week!"  But I am sleep deprived.  I just don't care.   The lady behind the window is aghast at my number 42.  She tells me "Number 42 would have been one of the first numbers for card renewals.  If you'd come here first, you would have been all done by now.  As it is, you'll be very lucky to get to be seen today."  She gives me a new ticket with as good of a number as she can finagle.  (I tell her that they need to re-post their signage.  She agrees.)

I was the third-to-last person to be seen that day.  The extra six hours wait were stressful and annoying, but not nearly so infuriating as that guy who, knowing we were ahead of him in line, willfully lied to us and pointed us off in the wrong direction!  He probably gained about a half-hour out of that.  One guy who had number 47, who had been waiting since 5:10 am, waited until the end of the day and didn't even get seen.  He has to go back Monday morning and wait in line all over again.  At least this time he'll know where to go.

Am I dreaming when I say that people are just not so terribly mean in smaller cities?  I can't imagine anyone purposefully misdirecting you at the Campbell DMV.    Maybe because the chance you may run into these people again is much higher.  Then again, maybe people do in fact misdirect you and that's why getting photographed for my California ID has always taken so long.

So these are the days that make me want to run, run, run away to Provence, or rural Missouri, even, and never ever return to life in the big city.  

On the upside, I did finish All the Pretty Horses (amazing!) and Benoît's book on global logistics strategy. Next post on optimizing global supply chains.