Carte vitale

After a reminder from the better half, thought I had better confront the bureaucracy of the French health system, so having gathered together my E106 which had been sent to me by Newcastle (very efficient and pleasant they were, too), plus the usual bits and bobs the French seem always to require, I marched down to the local office of the Caisse Primaire d'Assurance Maladie. It was a nondescript, concrete neo-brutalist building in a new, but not that new, bit of Antibes. I could tell I'd got to the right place by the resigned-looking queue cramming every nook and cranny. At least they hid the floor, which was paved with some of the grimmest public building tiling I've seen since the main post office in Rouen. They weren't that proud of it, though, because somebody had painted (some time ago, by the look of it) a tatty yellow 'no-one beyond here' line right across it - at an angle so subtly not quite parallel with the tiling itself that it was a real work of art.

So, it was my turn to queue, along with the various problem cases (mostly people trying to certify sick notes). Trouble was, in order to queue, I needed a ticket - for the sequence. In order to get a ticket, I needed to put my carte vitale (NHS card) into the ticket machine. It was precisely this carte vitale I had come to obtain. I used the principle of élan and jumped the queue to ask what to do. Nasty stares from the people who had clearly spent a week camping whilst awaiting their turn. The lady at the desk, after trying out the "You can't possibly not have a carte vitale" routine, then told me to undo the lid of the ticket machine and try the secret override button. It had been so much used it was practically worn away. So much for cardless folk being an impossibility!

That was me queueing, at last. Eventually, my turn came up. I marched up to the desk, pulled out my documentation and started my spiel. Hardly a sentence in to my oration, I was cut short. "Can't be done at this desk: go back and wait to be called to another desk".

Turn comes up again; new lady insists that I must already be registered on their system, and gets really cross when quite visibly I am not. Try to explain that I have come to get myself registered on their system. This line of reconciliation was not a good idea. Rather than just say that their local office was not able to do the transaction, which is a bog-standard one, they said that it was impossible to work out my situation regarding entitlements without a "prolonged and detailed study of the case", which could only take place in Nice. Afterwards, armed with the official results of this "research", they would look at the dossier. I decided against telling them that the form, a European one, detailed precisely the status of my entitlements, and that the research had kindly been done for them by the DHSS in Newcastle.

It was an interesting, if predictable, voyage into the mentality of la fonction publique, but it lost me quite a few hours of painting and decorating time. To cap it all, arrived back at the flat to find that the water had been turned off: not great for sluicing off the dirt of a day's work.