Oh la banque, la banque...
Really? Really?! So it has been…maybe a month or more since I opened my French bank account. It took about a week to set it all up, but the tricky part has been getting my debit card. I STILL do not have it. I have been stopping by the bank once or twice a week now to check in on it and my only answer is “it’s not ready.” Today, this was getting to be ridiculous. I just got a phone call from my favorite mysogynistic bank representative who told me why…
He had sent this official letter to verify that I live where I do. The postman would come, and I would sign a document, and then the postman would send it back to the bank. This went smoothly (again, over two weeks ago). On the phone he says, “You didn’t sign it.”
“Si si! I signed it! I told you…the postman came, I signed the thing.”
“Was it really you who signed?”
“I don’t understand…I just said I signed the paper…”
“It wasn’t accepted because the signature doesn’t match what’s on your passport.”
What? What does my signature on my passport look like? OH. Oh my God. The loopy cursive that I inscribed when I was 15 years old?! No joke, there is a heart as a dot above the i. Man, they let you have passports for a long time before they expire.
“Ohhhhhh. Mais, sorry but I wrote that when I was 15. I don’t think at 15 I had an official signature…it’s the handwriting of a teenager.” I didn’t mean to be so rude about this…but c’mon…I had signed about a gabillion documents for the bank in the past few weeks. In the presence of Mr. Representative. I even remember him COMMENTING on this.
So now, tomorrow, I must go in to pass the signature test. And in theory…I should be armed with a carte bleue on Tuesday.
Yay French bureaucracy! At least you made it past the first step: In order to open a bank account, you have to have a permanent residence. But in order to have a permanent residence (lease an apartment), you have to have a bank account! What fun!
