The good bureaucrat, or the way out of the labyrinth

If you’ve paid into a pension plan, you expect to get a pension back. In time. It turns out that, with French state pensions, ‘time’ can be rather long.

Danielle and I worked in France from 1996 to 2008. The French pension system is notorious for being ludicrously complicated. Indeed, one of the main things President Macron campaigned to do was reorganise it and, he hoped, inject a little more rationality into it. Ours was especially complicated as we spent some time as employees and some time self-employed, so we ended contributing to a bewildering number of funds.

That didn’t prove too big a problem for me, but only thanks to Gregory.

Who was Gregory, I hear you ask? Well, he was that rare creature, the bureaucrat with a human heart. I never met him, I never even had a telephone conversation with him. But I developed a picture of him just from our email exchanges. I always thought of him as a ‘lad’, which was probably unfair, especially as I realise that my mental image of him is of someone in his thirties or forties. Although I have no basis for even believing that.

What I know about him is that he actually wants to solve problems and help the people he’s dealing with. 

The pension system had warned me that it would take up to six months – actually, six months and two days – to sort out my entitlement and start paying me. I don’t know where they got the two days from. They make the estimate sound terribly accurate, don’t they? It’s like ‘seventeen minutes’ sounds like a time precise to the minute, whereas ‘quarter of an hour’ sounds like anything between twelve minutes (less would be ‘ten minutes’) and eighteen (more would be ‘twenty minutes’).

The impression of accuracy was just that. An impression and no more. It was more like twelve months and several attempts at communication by phone or email before, oh joy!, Gregory got involved.

To give you a sense of the kind of help he provided, when he asked me whether I was happy to backdate the payments to when I first submitted my application, I asked him whether it was better to take the extra value of the pension that had been added by the delay. He came back to me within a few hours – not a few days, let alone a few weeks – saying that he’d run a calculation and it would take seventeen years for any delay to add extra value greater than the payments lost by the delay. 

That certainly helped me choose the backdating option instead.

Unfortunately, poor Danielle wasn’t as lucky as I was.

One of the greatest honours for writers is to have their names used to form an adjective. You know, like Dickensian or Orwellian. One of the best is ‘Kafkaesque’. It describes the kind of nightmarish process that can suck you into an apparently endless labyrinth of bureaucracy where however far you go, your goal never seems any closer, while nothing seems meaningful and no one can tell you what you need to do to get out.

That’s what happened to Danielle over her French pension.

Kafka’s The Trial
or the nightmare of a bureaucratic maze
with no way through and no way out

She started, as I did with an online application to an organisation in Paris. Which referred her, as it referred me, to an office in Bordeaux. But that’s where our paths diverged. It was Bordeaux that put me in touch with Gregory. Danielle, on the other hand, was told that no, it wasn’t Bordeaux who was dealing with her case, it was Strasbourg. In Strasbourg they hadn’t heard of her. Back to Bordeaux she went. The papers were being sent across, it seemed. In Strasbourg they hadn’t received them. Then they had but they needed some more documents, even though Danielle had already submitted them. She sent them again. They lost them. She sent them again. Then they lost the whole file. She had to start again in Bordeaux and, once she’d prepared all her papers, they told her that she had to deal with Strasbourg.

The French are generous with ‘familles nombreuses’. You get a bit more of a pension if you have three kids or more. We have three boys. Well, sons – their ages range from 36 to 49 so ‘boys’ may be a misleading term. Danielle had to submit birth certificates for all three. She applied for them, received them and sent them in. Then they got lost. So she had to apply for new ones. Which also got lost. So she obtained a third set which, miraculously, no one lost.

She had to go through the process of officially applying for the birth certificates because copies won’t do. Nor will old certificates. Why on earth do bureaucracies need recent birth cerficates, not more than three months old? What do they expect to change? They think the date of birth might be revised, or what?

Still nothing happened. Danielle went online to Paris again. That was no good because her case was in the hands of the people in Bordeaux. Who told her to contact Strasbourg.

I may not have got the order of all those steps right, but you get the general picture.

But then, out of the blue, she got an email from the Bordeaux office. And it was signed by – Gregory.

He started off by pointing out that she seemed to have been mucked around dreadfully by his organisation. She agreed. He remembered having dealt with my case, and suggested he could perhaps handle hers. She agreed with that too. He then asked her whether she might like to have her first payment backdated to the day when she originally asked for a pension. She agreed again. Finally, and it was as if celestial choirs had broken into song, he asked for her bank account details.

With Gregory in charge, the process took two weeks. Within that time, the arrears of pension showed up in Danielle’s account followed by the monthly payments, regular as clockwork, without a hitch (so far, at least).

Leaving us thanking whatever powers run the universe for the existence of such as Gregory. The bureaucrat with the big heart. Who goes such a long way to make up for all the others.