The great paper mystery explodes: Chronic bag failure

Paperwork? Vraiment, ce n'est pas mon truc. I am the first to admit that filing isn't my forte.

Here you see the ultimate in desk-top filing systems: The Mark One Intermarche Two-Bag. Well, it actually is on a desk-top or at least my dining table pretending to be a desk-top. It does however have one overriding virtue. Everything is in one or other of the bags. I know it must be in there because it can't be anywhere else . . .

Naturally I, like everyone else who lives in France, never dare throw any paper away. This is in case officials dealing with such matters as money/tax/rates/cars/the mairie/national insurance/planning/insurance/family allowance/travel tickets/BMDs/your late great grandmother's inside leg measurement lose your dossier and insist that you send it them all again . . . so that they can lose it all again.

Without wishing to be unkind to l'adorable belle France, why is a country that so truly adores paperwork so bad at doing it? We've had a small blitz of such occult but perfectly normal and par for the course happenings in Fa lately:

Victim A was sent two completely different bills for the tax foncière (rates) for a house she no longer lives in, and thus didn't owe any tax on in the first place.

Victim B wondered why a decision was so slow over her home loan application. The bank eventually admitted that nothing had been done on her dossier because . . . they had lost it.

Victim C (me, actually) received a demand for a series of documents that I had omitted to send (translation: that we have lost but we want to cover our arses by pretending you forgot to send them). Actually they're talking about those bits at the bottom of the form that you're supposed to send back. Well you must have 'em because I sent 'em . Curiously the same office didn't manage to fail to cash the cheques that accompanied the documents. Odd isn't it?

It was whilst telling myself firmly that I must graduate to something more efficient than The Mark One Intermarche Two-Bag, that the truth came to me, in a blinding moment of revelation: All over France, all these offices keep everybody's paperwork in supermarket bags.

Imagine those wonderful national insurance people and their Mark Five Carrefour Sixty Million Bags and Counting, with chronic Intermarche floppy bag drive failure. It has to be the answer.

NB: I reflected further on this matter and decided that in fact each office has only one gigantic supermarket bag, the size of a black hole and with similar characteristics. And all the pieces of paper have to be in there. Somewhere . . .