It's a Beautiful Friday

And if I could, I would stay in bed writing on my laptop all morning long.  I love the feeling that comes when your wip is practically writing itself and you just sit back and enjoy the ride.

But alas, I have to get my arse out of bed and study.  For the French driving exam. 

As most of you know, the French have free health care.  It’s a wonderful system.  If you work, you get a social security card with a chip in it.  You swipe it when you go to the dr’s office and the visit is recorded and sent to the SS office for reimbursement of your 25 euro co pay or however much you paid for x rays, or hospital services.  Pharmaceuticals are basically free or mostly covered with prescription and what isn’t is paid by your second health insurance that many jobs provide.  

And then there’s the Center of Family Allocations.  Without this system, I doubt I would have had three children.  Did I mention they pay you when you have a baby?  Yes.  You get a bonus.   You get another bonus every September when your children go to primary school.  Mother’s day is a huge deal and many families gather around the matriarch for the festivities.

All of the above comes at a price.  The health care and the family allocations, as well intended as they are, cost a lot of money and France’s government is in debt up to their eyeballs.

So how do they manage to stay afloat? 

Well, their process for obtaining a driver’s license is a start.

In order to be presented for the written exam, you have to join a driving school.  It costs three times as much as it does in the U.S.

Then you have to go to ‘class’ which is basically a room with a bunch of chairs and dvd player and you answer multiple choice questions with a remote control that records them.

These multiple choice questions are based on images that might or might not show you the answers.

There are often two questions within the same question, each with their own set of answers and if you get one part wrong, the whole thing is wrong.

It is designed so that you FAIL.  One third of people fail their written exams the first time around.   Then they have to pay AGAIN to spend another eight months studying.

Same goes for the driving exam.  You fail, you wait, you pay,etc….

All of this makes the French government quite a bit of cash.

And then once you manage to get through their system, they unleash you into the jungle that is ‘french drivers’.  

You WILL have an accident.   If they can prove it’s your fault-

You go back to driving school.

Getting the picture?  Sorry to rant and rave, but I swear, this is the only thing that bugs me about living in France.  For now.  It has a tendency to change on some days.