Bonne Année!

Happy New Year tout le monde! Fear not, one of my resolutions this year is to be a bit more attentive to this blog...

For a country which can be incredibly work-shy, France can also be a bit of a slave driver when it feels like it. Hence why I am back at work on the 3rd January. That's a bank holiday in Scotland. It feels ridiculously early! However, the flipside of this is that I get a two week half term in just under six weeks, so I shouldn't really complain!

For the most part, it's lovely to be back. After all, I'm missing the apocalypse-style weather conditions and I've got a lot of things to look forward to this term, including skiing with the lower school, a cheeky jaunt to Paris and an even cheekier trip down to Lyon. So far, so joyful. Happy new year! I even had a good journey over, seeing as how I ended up on an Air France flight even though I booked it through Flybe - free drinks and snacks ahoy! And the seats are so roomy: I sat next to a pretty hefty lady and didn't even lose an inch of my seat to her. My return flight on Easyjet (AKA Pack 'em and Stack 'em Airways) will feel a major step down, let me assure you. But all in all, this put me in a very good mood.

So you can imagine my joy when I came back today to find not one, not two but three letters from the health insurance people. This is now 4 months on, and I thought I would never have to hear from them again (except for the niggling doubts because I have yet to receive my social security card thingy). I should have listened to the doubts. The goons have changed my social security number?! But it means I might receive my official card soon. (One can dream). Letter 2 informed me of my online login details. So far, so good. 

BUT WAIT

Letter 3 informed me that I needed to choose my "level of health insurance" - i.e. whether I was happy to pay the bare minimum and receive a euro a year in reimbursements or if I wanted to pay a small fortune to receive... 5 euros a year? (I may exaggerate slightly). There was even a dire warning at the bottom of the letter to "make sure I didn't stay without any insurance". All I had to do was choose my level of cover, fill in the mahoosive form, send in another two copies of my bank details (that would be the 5th and 6th copies then) and Bob's your proverbial uncle. Once you've worked out which of the prepaid envelopes to send the form back in, that is. In all their mystical wisdom, my health insurance provider was helpful enough to provide me with two prepaid envelopes, each with a different address, and with no indication of which envelope was the correct one. Presumably fate would decide whether or not I deserved my health insurance. I even checked this all out with the teacher who is responsible for me and she gave me the green light to cross my fingers and to proceed. So far so good...?

BUT WAIT

I dutifully trotted up to Annabelle The Secretary's office (she deserves her capital letters, see below) to get her to send off my form and to ask her to choose the envelope so it wasn't my fault if I sent it to the wrong place. Bear in mind that one envelope was for Marseille, the other for Paris, so it would be a bit of a big deal if it went to the wrong one! However, this turned out not to be that important in the end... Annabelle took one look at the letter, asked me if I really wanted to pay for this, and looked at me like I had 3 heads. I replied politely that yes, I thought it was better to be safe and sorry, so I was prepared to pay for insurance. She then changed her expression to look as if I had 6 heads, and proceeded to explain to me that IT WAS ALL A SCAM and that it was actually an extra service which I would have to pay for on top of my current health insurance, which is already up and running. This was my turn to look at her like a crazy woman, prompting her to ring up the insurance people and asking them to confirm that I was already covered and I didn't need to pay for anything else. This answer dutifully came (I was allowed to listen on speaker phone), and so I was dismissed, feeling like a very gullible foreigner. My only consolation is that the teacher I looked at the letter with fell for it too. 

So I just about managed to be pulled back from the precipice of Death By French Bureaucracy, but it just goes to show that you can't get too cocky. French bureaucracy will always triumph in the end, unless you have Annabelle the ninja secretary to sort your life out for you. She's like a real life Gandalf, albeit a female, non-bearded, much younger one. She's very much my favourite person right now! The only thing that concerns me at this point is that if it is so difficult for me to pay them or even just getting them to stop trying to scam me, how would I ever ask them to pay me back if I got sick?! I'm going to have to get Annabelle to take me to the doctors, I suspect.

That's all my news for now - hopefully I'll have some more soon and I'm going to try and get some more student quotes for you ASAP - I know that's all you're interested in! I don't start teaching properly again til next week though, so don't get your hopes up just yet.

Bises,

Sophia xx