Hi!…my name is…
What?…my name is…
Who?…my name is…
Slim Shady.
OK, so it’s really Rodney. And this is my report for my September vacation (umm, I mean assignment), doing the exciting work that is I/T Internal Audit.
“The Plane Ride”
The adventure started the moment I got on the airplane. So obviously, I was on an Americans Airlines flight. I got to the airport, it was fine; I got an exit row, it was fine; I found out the people sitting around me; that was not so fine. It seems that American Airlines flights now come with people in need of Elder Care and free screaming babies. And in the proudest of American Airlines tradition, the flight was 20 minutes late departing. So it was an interesting flight to say the least. Although I was as helpful as possible to the old man, I drew the line when he looked at me, smiled, and said “I have to go to the bathroom.” WIth that, I pressed the flight attendant button as if it were going to deliver the Messiah.
“My Fair Crazy Lady”
My second adventure involved a crazy lady in the restaurant. It seemed like she had an abusive husband, as she had more cuts and scrapes than Tina Turner. She was obviously drunk, and was talking to me in French. I tried to ignore her, saying in English “I don’t speak French.” The wait staff quickly got her away from me. Two minutes later, she blurts out “I can speak English!” At that moment, either she passed out in her onion soup or she spilled it (I think a higher power was on my side), but she ruined her dress and had to leave.
“It Is Better to Let People Think You Are Stupid than to Speak and Remove All Doubt”
We purchased, or so we thought, round-trip metro tickets each day to get back and forth to work. Now, this seems like it should be simple, but you are probably thinking of an American subway system. Paris has the most complicated system known to man. There is a Paris-centric Metro network, a suburban Paris RER train system and a rural SNCF train system. Now they all link together and you like have to use a mixture of all three to get to where you are going when you are a tourist. Anyway, after finding out our tickets wouldn’t let us out of the station, the train station Controllers stopped us. Turns out we had the wrong tickets. Now, being a master of talking my way out of things, I began speaking the worst English of all, Bostonian. She immediately realised that she’d have to speak English, so she was about to just let me through as opposed to fine me. But then, one of the people I was travelling with began to speak French. She smiled and opened her book of penality tickets. Now this book is color coded. Green tickets are only a 50 franc fine, Yellow tickets are $170 francs and Red are $500 francs. This is important because she immediately went to the yellow ticket. I reached deep inside and found the power to speak a brand of English that we thought was reserved for residents of rural Maine. She went back down to 50 francs. Then, the other people says to the lady “I think you are wrong.” Red, red, red. Finally, she realized that we were generally stupid and gave us the yellow ticket in part because we were stupid and part because we broke the rules. The moral of this story if you are ever confronted by the Controllers in the Paris Metro, you stand a good chance of getting away scott-free if you speak as if you are from Maine.
“Offering the Best Selection of Only One Item”
If you do ever come to Paris, you have to eat a place called L’Entrecote. It serves steak. That’s it. But it is good steak. The place opens at 7pm every night. By 7:30pm, the place is full and you’ll wait about an hour to be seated. At 8:30pm, you wait almost 2 hours. At 10pm, if you are not one of the first 30-40 people in line, you find somewhere else to eat. But the steak is just that good. It has been this packed for over 30 years. But the restaurant is very good and I highly recommend it. Just don’t ask for anything else. And vegetarians are automatically given a list of other restaurants they night enjoy.
“There Is A Gap for Fat People on the Champs-Elysees”
I went to the gap section at a mall to get a new shirt. And I saw a pair of pants that I liked. So I asked if they had them in my size. I tried on several pair, but decided that most of the pants were designed for a nation where people don’t weigh over 90 pounds throughout the course of their lifetime. So, the man looks at me and says the equivalent of “for our fatter patrons, you should go to the Champs-Elysees store.
Really, nothing overly exciting happened. It was actually a really good trip. My next stop is Stuttgart, Germany, and I will be taking an active part of Octoberfest.
Until next time.
–RC–