Talk to the Snail

by Stephen Clarke

  Here’s how the French ‘no means yes’ works.

  I was in Reims to visit the champagne cellars, and didn’t want to leave the city without seeing the most spectacular of them, at the Pommery winery. Only trouble was, it was Sunday lunchtime, I was due to leave on the five o’clock train, and you have to book a place on a guided tour.

  I phoned Pommery and asked when the next tour was.

  ‘Oh, we haven’t got any vacancies till the four forty-five tour,’ the hostess told me.

  ‘You’ve got nothing at all before that?’

  ‘No, sorry. We’re completely booked up.’

  At this point, the faint-hearted customer is supposed to ring off and leave the hostess in peace with her neat reservation list. But I’ve played the game before.

  ‘My train’s at five,’ I said, ‘so four forty-five would be too late.’

  ‘OK,’ the hostess replied, ‘how about two thirty?’

  ‘Perfect,’ I said, and reserved.

  There was absolutely no point entering into an abstract moral discussion about why the hell she hadn’t offered two thirty in the first place. I’d got what I wanted, so who cared?

  This happened to me again more recently, and I must be getting even better at the game because the result was an even more astonishing success.

  I was travelling from Lannion in Brittany to Paris, first taking a regional train and then changing on to the mainline TGV at Saint Brieuc. It was February 6th.

  At Lannion, I stamped my ticket in the composteur machine and got on my regional train, only for the ticket inspector, the contrôleur, to tell me that the date on my ticket was wrong. It said February 10th instead of 6th. This, I knew, wasn’t really my fault, because I’d told the man at the Gare de Lyon when booking my ticket that I wanted to come back on the Monday, and he’d got the date wrong. But there was no point telling the contrôleur this, because he’d only have told me that it was my fault for not checking the date. Which was true, I suppose.

  ‘It’s no problem on this train, because it’s a non-reservation service, but you’ll have to change your ticket before you get on the TGV, which is reservation-only. You can do it at Saint Brieuc station,’ he said, a worrying prospect given that I had only fifteen minutes to find the ticket office, queue up, get the change made and catch my connecting train.

  I was first out the doors of the regional train in Saint Brieuc, dashed to the ticket office, and found only three or four people ahead of me in the queue, which was an organized line with barriers, and not some anarchic ruck as it would have been a few years ago. Things were looking promising.

  My turn came – still ten minutes to go – and I set out to explain my problem to the lady behind the counter, a youngish woman who looked fairly at ease with the world and not out to prove to her customers what a cruel place it can be. Which was a relief.

  ‘Bonjour,’ I said brightly, as always.

  ‘Bonjour,’ she replied, a little too suspiciously for my liking.

  So, taking a lesson from the (as yet unwritten) first chapter of this book, I heaped the blame on myself.

  ‘I made a mistake when booking my ticket. I got one for dix février instead of six février,’ I said. I handed it to her. She read – rather slowly, I thought – my itinerary. The regional train’s times of departure and arrival, the same for the TGV, with my seat and carriage number, and the wrong date.

  ‘I can’t change a ticket once you’ve started the journey,’ she finally replied.

  ‘But I haven’t started the TGV bit of the journey.’

  ‘Yes, but you’ve composted your ticket. I can’t replace it.’

  This, I knew, was the moment critique. She had pursed her lips and put the ticket down in front of her, as if to wash her hands of it. If I gave up now and picked up the ticket, I was a goner.

  ‘Yes, I composted it before I got on the train at Lannion,’ I said, pushing the ticket barely a millimetre back towards her across the counter, ‘because I didn’t know it was the wrong date. It was the contrôleur who noticed.’

  ‘You should have checked the date when you bought the ticket.’

  ‘Yes, you are right, but I just assumed that the ticket seller would give me the right date. I don’t understand how the mistake happened. I always knew I was coming back today. Perhaps I said “dix” instead of “six”.’

  We’d reached an impasse. But we’d had a nice philosophical discussion about the nature of my mistake and the way the French railway ticketing system works. And the most important thing was that I had found a comeback – a non-aggressive reply – to everything she said. I clearly wasn’t going to give up and go away, or offer to buy a new ticket.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said, and went away with my ticket.

  I felt like the accused waiting for the jury to return its verdict. The SNCF clock on the wall clicked one more minute, two. My TGV was out there somewhere, heading towards me. Less than eight minutes to go. Maybe, I thought, it was a war of attrition. I was meant to panic and rush off to the platform, get on the train without a ticket and pay a fine.

  Another click passed and she came back. Her lips were still pursed, but she looked me in the eye, just like the jurors do when they’re going to find you not guilty. A wave of joy swept over me. I wasn’t going to the guillotine after all.

  ‘OK, I’ll change it,’ she said. ‘But this is totally exceptional. Don’t do it again.’

  ‘Ah, c’est super, merci,’ I said. ‘I really don’t know how it happened.’

  She slowly wrote something on the ticket in red ink, presumably her reasons for agreeing to this exceptional exchange. Another minute clicked by, but I kept my mouth shut. She was in control now, she knew when the train was due in, she would get the job done in time.

  ‘Give me your credit card,’ she said. I hesitated for a moment, wondering why. ‘I have to credit you with ten euros,’ she added, ‘because this new ticket is less expensive.’

  ‘Oh.’ I handed over the credit card, and watched her print out a new Saint Brieuc–Paris ticket and a credit-card refund slip for ten euros.

  ‘I’ve reimbursed the full price of your original ticket and issued a new one for just the Saint Brieuc–Paris leg. It was the only way to do it,’ she said. ‘Voilà.’

  She handed over my double prize. My honest mistake had earned me ten euros.

  ‘C’est très gentil,’ I said. ‘Merci beaucoup.’ I wished her a bonne semaine (good week) and rushed off to get my TGV.

  I wondered why she’d done this for me. No doubt my innocent mistake and my apologetic nature had counted in my favour. And my tacit refusal to give in and accept my fate had been a key factor, too.

  On top of this, I’m sure that the woman got a kick out of the knowledge that she held my fate in her hands. Her decision would affect my journey and my mood. She had the power to make or break my day. And, like most French counter assistants I have met, she used her power benevolently. They only take the opportunity to annoy you if they dislike you personally, so it’s best not to give them the chance. Play the lost innocent, stay polite and apologetic, and they’ll take pity on you. Tell them that their system is absurd, though, and they’ll use all its absurd power against you.

  Again, as at the Pommery cellar, the vital thing was not to get annoyed at the initial ‘no’ in response to my request, a feat that becomes almost impossible when you reach . . .

  Level Three

  TRY TO DRIVE THE CUSTOMER MAD

  The most frequent examples of this happen when there are two or more people serving at the same time, in a tourist office, bank, car-hire place or shop.

  One customer inadvertently causes a problem. Let’s say someone wants to do an unusual transaction at the bank. Approximately three seconds after the problem has arisen, all the counter assistants have stopped serving their customers and are gathered at the window where the non-standard-transaction dilemma has cropped up.

  I’ve lost out at this stage of t
he game many times in the past, and almost always because I rose to the bait too soon, or misjudged the placing of the moral onus (which can be as painful as it sounds). The worst case of misplaced onus that I have suffered in France was when my mobile phone wouldn’t recharge, and I took it into the local phone shop for a diagnosis.

  There were three sales people on duty, and no obvious queuing system – it was first come, first served, but only if you stuck up for yourself. All three sales assistants were busy, and there was one person in front of me.

  One of the assistants was annoying me intensely by discussing her customer’s scarf – ‘Elle est belle, where did you get it?’, ‘It was made by a friend of mine’, ‘Oh, yes, does she sell them?’, ‘No, but she ought to, don’t you think?’, ‘Yes, and if she decides to go into business, let me know, won’t you?’. Nyaarrgh.

  But it was no use wading in and asking whether one customer’s scarf was more important to the phone shop than another customer’s phone. Truth be told, I was a bit scared of the answer I’d get. Anyway, after a couple of minutes, two of the assistants – including the potential scarf-buyer – miraculously became free at the same time.

  One of them asked how he could help the man ahead of me, who said he wanted to take out a new subscription. Scarf Woman half-turned to me, her service-giver’s automatic smile on her face. But as she did so, she glanced across at the man who wanted the subscription, and then, as I stepped forward with phone out-thrust, she suddenly veered away from me and joined the two men in front of a computer. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t even exist.

  For a few seconds I stood there watching the three of them bending over the screen as if it was showing the next day’s lottery results. If the scarf affair hadn’t already annoyed me, I might have waited a couple more minutes to judge the situation, but I let my frustration out.

  ‘Excuse me interrupting,’ I said with as much fake politeness as I could muster, ‘but does it really need two of you to deal with one person?’

  ‘Yes, it does, actually,’ Scarf Woman told me sternly. ‘My colleague is a trainee and needs help with new accounts.’

  ‘Ah, sorry,’ I said, thinking ‘Oh merde, I’ve had it now.’

  In a way it wasn’t my fault. A good sales person would have told me that she’d get to me as soon as she’d helped out her trainee. But that was now irrelevant. I knew I’d just wasted even more minutes of my life. All three of the sales people had heard the exchange, and none of them were going to hurry up and serve me. The man opening an account even had a homemade-looking scarf. The woman was probably going to ask him to write out the knitting pattern.

  Ten full minutes later, Madame Scarf dragged herself away from the trainee and grudgingly served me. I explained my problem. She took the phone, tested it and told me that my recharge lead was probably faulty, and here was a new one. Twenty-eight euros, please.

  As I paid, I looked into the recharge socket of the phone, and noticed something I hadn’t seen before.

  ‘Should that little shiny thing be in there?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, giving me my change, wishing me a tetchy ‘bonne journée’ and turning to the nearest fluffy-neckwear-owning customer.

  When I got home, instead of taking the lead out of its wrapping, I got some tweezers, poked about in the recharge socket, and pulled out a little piece of aluminium foil that had got in there, probably from a chewing-gum wrapper in my pocket. I plugged in my old recharge cable and the phone instantly began to charge up.

  Oh, double merde, I thought. If I hadn’t caused a scene at the shop I could go back, play the stupid innocent and get a refund. But now I’m stuffed. It would be, ‘Oh, well, that’s not our problem, you should have checked,’ etc, etc.

  I still have that lead unopened in its packet, and am patiently waiting for someone to say that they want a new Sagem recharge cable for their birthday. And all because I let myself be provoked by a typical French service situation.

  I don’t want to suggest that service in France is always bad. It’s just that getting good service is often an effort. But that is what makes it so rewarding, too. You come across such great professionals. French shops, for instance, can be temples of good service. After all, this is still a nation of individual shopkeepers, so you can buy your stuffed olives, perfume, fish or lingerie from an expert. But the greatest service professionals have to be the ones with the worst reputation – waiters. Until you’ve been served by a good French waiter, you’ve never been served at all.

  I once had lunch at the Jules Verne restaurant up on the Eiffel Tower. There I was, with one of the most beautiful restaurant views in the world spread out below me, being allowed to enjoy it by waiters who didn’t force me to spend half the meal scanning the kitchen door for signs of life. The service was swift and polite, and the waiter practically knew the name of every cow, sheep or goat that had provided the cheese on the trolley.

  It was pure class, like playing a game with a champion and getting treated as an equal. Which is the bottom line of French service. In France, they have a saying – ‘le client est roi’, or the customer is king. But this is total nonsense, because you, the customer, are at very best an equal.

  And if you’re tempted to get uppity and insist that you’re a roi, just remember what France did to its royal family.

  Mots Magiques

  Even if you’ve got the right attitude, you need the appropriate vocabulary to turn getting served in a French café from a chore into a plaisir. Here are a few magic words:

  GARÇON (‘GARSO’)

  First, one to forget. No one shouts ‘Garçon!’ in a French café. Unless they don’t want to get served, that is. To attract a waiter or waitress’s attention, just raise your arm and call out ‘S’il vous plaît!’, or catch their eye and say ‘Bonjour’ (or ‘Bonsoir’ if it’s the evening, of course). Remember that in the French service sector, saying ‘Bonjour’ and ‘Bonsoir’ is the accepted code for ‘Hello, I’m sorry to interrupt your phone call/racing results/nail-varnishing/cigarette/chat with your friend, etc, but I would like to be served eventually if it’s not too much trouble.’

  EXPRESS (‘EXPRESS’)

  If you like your espresso, this is what to order. You can ask for un café noir, or just un petit café, but un express is what the waiters themselves call it. Use this word and they’ll think, ‘Aha, this person has been in a French café before, no point trying to rip him/her off.’

  ALLONGÉ (‘ALLON-DJAY’)

  Café allongé is the waiters’ name for an express with extra water. It’s weaker than an espresso but less like bison pee than American coffee.

  CRÈME (‘KREM’)

  Waiters’ jargon for a café au lait. All too often I hear English-speaking tourists asking for ‘un café olé si voo play’ and I know they’re going to end up with a cripplingly expensive tureen of beige soup. For full effect, make sure you get the pronunciation right – ‘krremm’. Imagine trying to say it while dislodging an oyster that has got stuck on your tonsils.

  NOISETTE (‘NWA-ZET’)

  If you want an espresso with a dash of milk, this is what to ask for. It’s short for un café noisette, or hazelnut-coloured coffee. But of course you knew that.

  DÉCA (‘DAY-KA’)

  This is the waiters’ word for a decaf. Useful if you’re planning to get any sleep after a heavy dinner.

  THÉ AU LAIT (‘TAYOLAY’)

  If you want a drink approaching English-style tea, you must remember to ask for thé au lait, or you will probably just get a small teapot of hot water with the tea bag, still in its packet, lying on your saucer. Ask for thé au lait and you will also get a tiny jug of milk. Even so, unless the café does Earl Grey or Darjeeling, the warm liquid you receive will probably remind you of the description of Arthur Dent’s computer-generated drink in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – ‘almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea’.

  DEMI (‘D’MEE’)

  Ordering a beer is just as t
ricky as getting coffee or tea. The standard measure in France is un demi, literally a half. This is not a half litre (come on, you can’t expect the French to make things that simple). It’s twenty-five centilitres, about half a pint. Serving beer is the waiter’s favourite way of ripping off tourists. In summer, the Champs-Elysées is lined with foreign visitors forlornly trying to finish the two-litre flagons of lager they received when they rashly asked for ‘oon beer sivoo play’. Some waiters are so determined to make an extra euro or two that even if you ask for a demi they might come back with ‘Petit, moyen ou grand?’ (Small, medium or large?). The required response is a look of bafflement and the killer phrase ‘Mais un demi est un demi, non?’

  PRESSION (‘PRESSYO’)

  Draught beer. If you manage to get the demi business right, the waiter might still try to trick you by rattling off the names of different beers at Thierry Henry speed. Get it wrong and you’ll end up with an expensive bottle. If you say ‘un demi pression’ you can look over at the beer taps and read or point. At worst you’ll end up with the slightly more expensive of the two or three brands on sale. A couple of tips – a seize is a relatively cheap ‘1664’, and Heineken is pronounced ‘eh-neck-EN’.

  QUART (‘KAR’)

  You can almost always get a pichet (‘pee-shay’) of wine instead of a (more expensive) bottle or half-bottle. On the menus the pichets will often be marked as ‘25cl’ and ‘50cl’, or a quarter-litre/half-litre. You can sound really experienced in restaurant-survival techniques if you ask for ‘un quart de rouge’ or ‘un pichet de cinquante de rouge’. Remember that a bottle (75 centilitres) is six glasses, so a quart is two, and 50cl is four.

  CARAFE (‘KARAF’)

  Only the snootiest of restaurants will refuse to serve you tap water. But you’ve got to ask for ‘une carafe d’eau’, a small jug of water. Failure to specify this will result in you receiving a bottle of Evian, San Pellegrino or Badoit, which is not unpleasant, just more expensive. If you want to be really clever, when a waiter or waitress offers you branded water, just say no thanks and ask for ‘Château Chirac’, meaning a carafe of normal French tap water. The risk here is that the waiter will think you’re too clever for your own good and might plan some form of comeuppance like ‘forgetting’ to bring you bread.