24/7 services in France
February 7th, 2007 | 
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This is one area of 21st century living where France is at best in the 20th century and quite often in the 19th, particularly if you’re a foreigner. As you drive through France, that just about every petrol station of any consequence advertises itself as 24/7. If you look at the small print, you’ll find that outside the normal hours of about 8am to noon and 2pm to about 8pm these stations are automated. Fair enough, after all France is quite rural and a lot of these stations don’t get a lot of business outside normal working hours. The snag is that when they’re automated you almost always have to have a French debit card to use them so they’re not really 24/7 if you’re a foreigner.
This sort-of 24/7 service applies to many things in France. For instance, we recently had a problem with our electricity on a Sunday afternoon. We weren’t expecting to get any help from the local electricans as it’s virtually impossible to get them to do anything as regular readers will know so we thought that we’d try calling those advertising themselves as 24/7. It turns out that the expression “24/7” in France means that they have an answering machine switched on outside normal working hours and don’t actually do any work at the weekend. One consequence of this is that there’s a bit of a backlog of work needing to be done each Monday. As a result, none of the electricians that we called at the weekend arrived ’til after the work had been done by a very competent Dutch electrician on Monday morning.
So if you need dependable 24/7 service, ’tis best to look somewhere else than France. I do hope that the expected flood of brits still to come here think that it’s still cute when their electricity conks out at 5pm on Friday and there’s no service ’til Monday morning, even from “24/7” places.
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This is by no means unique to France. You would face the same situation in most of Europe and in much of the rural U.S.: If you don’t have a locally valid card, you will not get service outside of full-service hours.
The good news is that the EU has just agreed compatibility and opening-up reforms that will generalize compatibility in financial services and should eventually allow perfect substitution between accounts from various countries. That’s another advantage of being in the Euro zone, of course.