Ca Marche Pas

I was going to start by saying that France isn't like a third-world country.

But I've never really traveled in a third-world country. So maybe I should just say it isn't much like Switzerland, Canada, Germany, the US, or the UK, in terms of it's technological prowess.

It all started when I had arrived in the Lyon train station - I was going to meet Korey and Jenny there, and since I arrived a little before they did (train vs. traffic), I wanted to sync up my mails. I had seen signs for the wifi (or, as I learned that the English call it, whif-ee) availability in the station. So I booted up, searched, and, sure enough, there was the login page. It gave me the option to log on with an existing account... as long as it's with a French provider. My Swisscom credit works in other countries, but, I guess, not in France.

That kind of became a sort of theme.

Anyways, they had another link to buy time if you didn't already have an account with one of four French phone services. So I clicked on the link, and this is what I got back:

Le serveur n'a rien trouvé à l'adresse spécifiée.
Veuillez nous excuser pour la gène occasionnée.

A rough translation is "did you make that up? we don't have that web page - better luck next time". Well, I thought, it's probably just because I had tried to access it from the English start page; the English versions generally receive a little less in terms of testing than the French pages. So I navigated through in French, and got the same error.

Okay, no whif-ee.

I eventually did meet up with Korey and Jenny - we found the campground and decided to grab some groceries. We hit the nearby Champion (a French grocery chain), and when we got to pay, I pulled out my Visa card. The card reader was one of the ones that seems to use the chip instead of the strip, and mine has never worked that way. Still, most cashiers feel much better if they've tried the chip first, no matter what assurances I give them.

So, she tried the chip.

Oddly enough, it didn't work. Choking back the instinct to try to remember the translation for "I told you so", I suggested that perhaps the strip may yield a better result. She shook her head, and hit the card reader with her hand... and tried the chip again. And this continued for several minutes - the cashier swearing under her breath, hitting the machine, yanking my card out and shoving it back in.

Well, I guess the good news was that, by the time she got around to trying the strip, it didn't work, either. I ended up trying four other cashiers over the course of our visit, and my card, it seems, doesn't work anywhere in their store.

When I was looking at train schedules to get back to Lyon, to get back to Geneva (more on that in a forthcoming post), I managed to find my way through the French national train site to identify the ticket I wanted to buy, the date, the class, the seat, my address, name, phone number. credit card info, favorite flavor of ice cream (chocolate), turn-ons (long walks on the beach), first pet (a fish... pretty sure he had a name, but I don't remember it)... and hit "process"...

To get a message telling me that, due to a technical problem, my transaction had been canceled. No indication of what the problem may be, what role I may have played in it, or how it could be resolved. I tried several more times, always with the same error, and just gave up. I could buy a ticket at the station before I left... on a much earlier train in case there wasn't room on the one I wanted.

Oh well. They do make lovely wine.