12: Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

You can’t claim to know a country you love until you break up with it or it breaks up with you. On a macro level, many undocumented workers, who, even if they spent years in the US fearing the knock on the door, maybe didn’t anticipate the current level of horror ICE is currently inflicting. On a micro and much more privileged level, the process of ending a lease, closing utility accounts, and canceling my mobile phone service, and leaving France caused me to reflect on aspects of French and American infrastructures.

Like birds, humans have never not been migratory, and so the fact of migration isn’t so much the problem as is its management. Language is a medium of that management — or should be, when it’s working well. When I started the process of closing accounts, I was told I had to initiate all of it over the phone. The panic I felt on a call with the gas and electric company intensified at a rate proportional to the increasingly technical terminology the representatives used. When I asked them to slow down, they didn’t. In each case, from the start of the call, the ambient sounds of the call center and the quality of the connection spelt doom for the successful conclusion of my purpose — which was to close my account. I asked politely as I could whether there was someone who spoke just a little English. No one spoke English. I did my damnedest to construct coherent sentences in French.¹

In the end, I was told the electricity would end on a certain date, but a technician had to turn off the gas in my presence in the apartment. In similar fashion, when I went to the store of the mobile phone and internet company, an employee in the store told me I could only cancel my mobile and internet contracts over the phone and he would arrange for the company to call me. He gave an appointment time when the call would come. I answered the phone two hours after the appointed time, at which point the rep told me my internet would be cut off in a few days, but, to cancel my phone contract, I’d have to send a registered letter to an address that was utterly incomprehensible to my ear. And then he hung up. Despairing, I scoured the company’s website. Then, right down at the bottom of the page, I noticed a button in tiny letters, “Mon compte.” (“My account”) It took me to a page where after close scrutiny I saw the words, “Plus de besoin de mon compte,” (“I no longer need my account.”). That link led me to yet another page with a prominent link right in the center of my screen, “Resiliation de contrat.” (“Cancellation of contract). I clicked. Within two minutes, I had email confirmation of the cancellation of my phone service contract. I felt gaslit.

The US might be marginally ahead in the call-center game on one key point. Every American, regardless of the languages they speak, who has called a company or government office with an automated menu has undoubtedly heard the words, “Para servicio en español, opprime el numero…”, even if he or she doesn’t understand what the words mean. Do French government agencies or companies offer such options? I don’t know. Does this option undermine the motivation for non-English speaking residents of the US to learn English? Maybe. However, accessing services, public or private, may not be the most effective point at which to apply pressure to conform to the majority. My experience has taught me that the world’s ever changing bureaucratic instruments are a nightmare for non-native speakers of dominant languages to negotiate. You bet I’d procrastinate as long as possible if I had to regularly make calls like the ones I’ve made repeatedly over the past week!

Until tomorrow morning, Billie and I are installed at a hotel on the perimeter of Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle airport. It’s comfortable, surrounded by enough patches of grass to keep Billie interested, and its restaurant serves decent hotel food. Tomorrow morning, we fly back to JFK and the Musk Maelstrom. I hope to enter the Hudson flat around 8pm tomorrow night, if the train is on time.

I didn’t plan my attempt to emigrate as a way of escaping Trump’s regime. I started planning it when I thought Harris would win. Now, my gut is encouraging me to return to a social web I’m familiar with. As long as my fixed income resides in the US, I feel more secure settling where I understand the terminology, know how to negotiate my structural landscape, recognize the cultural implications of what is happening, and can participate in protest without risking my immigration status. We’re all now entering a period when we will need to understand and see clearly what is happening around us. And, speaking only for myself, I don’t feel easy trying to do that from afar.

1. Please don’t tell me it was good for me.