Apparently these looked cool lit up...
The French have a contentious relationship with time. When I was younger my father would tell me how he was fond of the fact that as a toddler I would not go to sleep until the minute my bedtime struck. He would later lament when this gave way to the ‘9ish’ ambiguity of my stepmother, complaining it was a relaxed American standard. Today, I know that perhaps compared to the German example ‘9ish’ would imprecise, but to the French, ‘9ish’ regardless of the situation would be early or late pending some standard I have yet to understand.
Monday, under the pressure of an impending deadline at work, I was able to duck out of the office for only 20 minutes to try and stop off at the bank during lunch. Of course from 1230 to 150 pm the bank was closed. It’s not even a lunch hour. Who determines these arbitrary off times? Who deigned the 80 minute Monday lunch, when the rest of the week the bank is open continuously?
This phenomenon is constantly on display to me. I usually come into the office before the designated in time of 9 in the morning, often the first to arrive. I don’t mind this, we all usually stay late, and I like having the time in the morning to check out the goings on I missed due to the time difference with America, be it Peter King’s Monday Morning QB, the latest chicanery on Deadspin, or what have you. But meetings are another item entirely. I have yet to have a meeting be less than ten minutes en retard. Of course these meetings then inevitably extend past their designated end time. Often, I feel as though this country is an hour and ten minutes ahead of GMT just to mess with the foreigners. In fact, I wonder what time movies start.
At the end of the day though there was a large party scheduled at Place de la Concorde, commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago. Scheduled to begin at 7, I assumed the festivities would continue into the night to remember such a momentous event. I left the office at about 7, having been working until then, thinking I might have missed the first few minutes but that I should be beholden to a spectacle I had not seen since election night in Grant Park last year. When I arrived at 735, the party was over, and the police were clearing out only the stragglers. How can a people be so damned punctual for a party, and tardy for work?
What time is it?
That is because work can wait and a party does not
where are your priorities, become more French and you will understand