French Bureaucracy and Phone Numbers

Bureaucracy

In my (admittedly limited) experience, I have to say I think French bureaucracy gets a bad rap.

Our key areas of exposure to French administrative processes to date have been:

• The house purchase (immobilier and notaire)
• Banking (CA/Britline)
• Electric (EDF)
• Water (SUEZ)

Working with all of these has required admin  processes to be followed as you would expect but, in large, they have gone smoothly - and I would suggest that (other the natural challenges arising from a foreign language) they have gone at least as smoothly as would have been the case if we were dealing with UK institutions.

For instance, the house purchase from accepted offer to getting possession took less than 11 weeks.

Even the language barrier was (largely) broken down by having a notaire with excellent English and using Britline (CA's banking division tailored for British ex-pats) and EDF's English speaking service.

The only real challenges we have had have been getting documents translated (even Britline issues a number of their contractual documents in French only and many of the institutions websites are in French) and needing a French phone number before we could set-up the online portal for our water provision with Suez.

For the translations, Google Translate was sufficient 90%+ of the time - and if you right-click in Chrome, you can even get a translation of websites.

Phone Number

The need for a French phone number is mildly frustrating. The only reason we have needed one so far is,as I say, to register to access our water accounts online with SUEZ; getting the account itself was fine by the way. The online registration form required a 10 digit number. UK numbers, including STD, are 11 digits. Leaving out the STD doesn't help - adding the country code doesn't either.

But there is a solution.

Skype offer what they call 'Skype-In' numbers  for a range of countries, including France (https://secure.skype.com/my/skype-number). They provide you with French number that people can call. Incoming calls are then directed to your Skype client. If you're not online you can have call forwarding set-up to send the call to another phone (i.e. your mobile - this didn't work for me) or to Skype voicemail (this did work for me). 

This service, unlike 'normal' Skype, isn't free however. it cost £41.48 per year. I'd be interested to hear anyone's suggestions for a similar (cheaper) service - or for alternative solutions.