You have got to be kidding...

Before we leave for the Land of SUVs and Starbucks, I wanted to be sure all our bills are in order. I thought it would be nice to come back to running water and lights that come on - call me picky. Anyway...in order to fully understand this puzzle, let me give you some background on the bill paying process in France.

1. Your first bill arrives in the mail, with a due date of about 7 days out.

2. With the bill is a return envelope and an authorization form for you to sign and date which will allow the company to withdraw X amount from your French checking account. This first time you must also include an R.I.B. print-out, which is basically your bank and personal identifying info. Kind of like a cancelled check.



3. Mail this back in the designated envelope, no staples or tape, with sufficient postage. I get a kick out of this part. "Affranchir au tarif en vigueur." Vigorously affix enough postage, is my loose translation.

4. From here on out, your bills will arrive with a tear-off slip with your bank and personal info all neatly printed on there. No checks to write. You just sign, date, and mail back vigorously. A pretty good system, I think.

I've toyed with the idea of online bill paying, but between all the fine print en francais and the somewhat ghetto websites that only function when the wind blows correctly, I've decided the little slip method works just dandy.

Until...we go to America and won't be here to sign, date, and mail vigorously. So I've been trying to navigate the murky waters of online bill paying for France Telecom (phone), EDF (electricity), and GDF (gas). Here's what I've learned:

- the first time you pay online, you still have to print out a form and mail it in to your bank. They, in turn, have to process it before the bill is due. Kind of a tight deadline...especially since we're in full bank holiday season - August!

- you also have to have the paper bill in hand the first time you pay online because they ask for certain "confidential identifying information." As if someone's going to try to pay my bills for me.

- The gas and electric companies, EDF and GDF, send two separate paper bills and tear-off slips, but their websites are joined when it comes to payment. I was trying to figure out why the gas bill was so high, and the electric bill was nonexistent. Gee - why didn't I think that they might be combined in the internet world?

After a lot of "auggghh" and "this does NOT make sense!" I finally managed to pay the EDF/GDF bill online. But somewhere I missed the step to print out the payment authorization form, and that pushed me over the edge to hysterical crying and fueled my argument for why we need to move back to America right now. In the end, we got the form printed and mailed to the bank, where it took a full two weeks to be processed - but that's another vent.

So here we are, 73 hours away from Southern soil, fairly sure that the gas and power will still be on when we get back. But...we need copies of our most recent bills to prove residency when we go to get our visas renewed on the day we fly back to Lyon.

I guess if you pay online, they don't send you a paper bill. And their sites it say you can print off copies, so no sweat, right? Ha. For EDF/GDF, their site says the bill is unavailable online because it had "irregularities." (By that they mean that since they overcharged us by 200 percent on our winter bills, they're still paying back what they owe us until we break even. That's "irregular" by their definition, so of course can't be seen online.)

Rabbit trail: I saw on the EDF/GDF site that you now have the option of paying based on your actual consumption, rather than an estimate of what they think you've used. I went to sign up for it, and got this message:

Mme Masson: VOUS N'AVEZ PAS DROIT A CE SERVICE!

Which means that I am not allowed to have this option. What??!? I read all the fine print and nowhere did it say that some were not eligible for it. And are the CAPS and exclamation point really necessary? It's not like I did something offensive and therefore can't be allowed to pay based on what we consumed. Anyway... I checked my e-mail a few seconds later and what did I have? Not one, but two identical e-mails from EDF/GDF welcoming me to the new pay-by-consumption service. Are you kidding me?

End of rabbit trail.

For France Telecom, paying online seems a bit less tricky. They even let you do it by French Carte Bleue debit card rather than vigorously mail in the little slip. I'll find out for sure how it works in about two weeks when I try to pay it from the U.S. Until then, I thought I'd take a look at my recent phone bills online to see if any will work for the proof of residency for the visa renewal.

Click!

Lovely. The message says that due to an "incident", bills are no longer available online as of June 26. But they are working to get this service back up and running.

Do you think they're working vigorously?