France's Dubious Record

A wine shop in the Quartier Latin.

Montmartre's Missing Flics

Paris:- Sunday, 7. May 2000:- The score is not final, but France seems to have broken - probably its own - records for numbers killed in road mishaps during the recent long weekends.

The first, for Easter, saw 90 killed. A tremendous campaign aimed to cajole drivers into prudence, was rewarded with 98 killed during the 1st of May weekend.

Media pressure was increased for this final long weekend. Final figures were unavailable tonight, but it was feared that the toll for the three weekends would be well above 200 killed and hundreds injured.

Police were out en masse throughout the three weekends and they used all the 'repression' available to them.

The numbers killed in road accidents has been steadily declining in France, but France still manages to have one of the worst records in Europe.

According to experts, many French drivers see no relation between road accidents and their personal responsibility for them. Nearly three-quarters think 'fate' is involved, or 'other drivers.' Four-fifths of French drivers judge themselves to be 'good drivers.'

Thus, speeding is merely considered a minor misdemeanor, worthy of being lightly excused. Meanwhile, after this weekend, the Minister of Transport is likely to be looking closely at the idea of prison for speeders.

Throughout the weekend, TV-news has showed stay-at-homes grisly video-clips of real accidents and real victims, with lots of real blood. Also shown, have been films of the horribly handicapped survivors.

As I understand it, despite the widespread adoption of using portable phones in cars while driving, mobile TV-sets have still not caught on.

Telephone Melt-Down

France's national telephone operator France Télécom says a subscriber can expect a failure of service about once every 12 years. This is very good news.

On Wednesday, France Télécom's subscribers apparently experienced a 'mega-breakdown' in Paris. I learned about this from Thursday's le Parisien. This means the next near-total collapse of service can be expected in 2012.

Apparently many users were informed by robots that 'due to saturation, your call cannot be completed. Please try again.' Paris' two million subscribers were tearing their hair out.

This reminds me - if my modem is 'talking' to my ISP, does the operator's robot tell my modem the same thing? In any case, the probable cause of the problem was FT's super software for managing all us telephone yakkers - appropriately named 'Sémaphore.'

Le Parisien calls it a 'petit bijou de technologie.' What Parisians may call it is unprintable. Around 10:30 on Wednesday, it 'disfunctioned.' First and worst hit were all firms using digital lines.

Victims of the 'defect computer' were estimated at half the telephone users in the Ile-de-France. I must have been in the group of the other half of users.

The last 'collapse' occurred in 1992 when a football stadium in Corsica fell down and the French forced the telephone operator to its knees, by calling loved ones - few of whom were in the stadium or even on the island at the time. I also would like to point out that 1992 was less than 12 years ago.

Oddly, many telephone users seemed to think that if their wired phone didn't work, their unwired one would. The result was even more people out on the street than usual, furiously taping their tiny plastic phones and shouting "Allo Allo!" at them.

France's statistics unit, the INSEE, regularly calculates the morale of France's residents, somehow, and last week was pleased to make an astounding claim.

For the first time since - oh, about 1992 - is this a co-incidence? - the INSEE thinks French optimism can be reliably rated at 'plus 2.'

I was unaware that this measure stood at minus 23 when Lionel Jospin became Prime Minister in 1997. I was equally unaware that the bottom was reached in late 1996, during the government of Alain Juppé, when positivism in France was at minus 39.

Zero is the state when optimists equal pessimists, and the fuzzy graph in the paper seems to show that we reached this level as the year changed from 1999 to 2000.

Going into the crowd at Etoile late on Friday, 31. December 1999 I did have my doubts; but these were much relieved when I managed to escape from the mob's clutches at about 00:15 on Saturday, 1. January 2000.