Véolia – not fit for purpose

Today Véolia showed that it is a travesty, an appallingly inept organisation, an utter shambles and one whose management should hang their heads in shame.

I have had a request outstanding since June 1st (that’s seven weeks) for a simple piece of work to be carried out to connect up my land in Fleurac to the mains water supply. It is merely for a meter to be fitted to an already installed water supply and for a stand-pipe and tap. With my plumbing knowledge I could do it myself in a couple of hours, but I can’t of course because the over-arching incompetence of the French public sector bureaucracy would then be unable to come into play.

After waiting for all these weeks and never getting any sort of meaningful reply from Véolia indicating that they either understood or cared about my request, at long last last week I got what I thought was a sensible response from ‘client services’ (an oxymoron if ever there was one) saying that I needed to go to a ‘local’ office.

The proposed office in question was at Bergerac, about an hour’s drive from here, and when I queried this the venue was changed to Sarlat, which, of course, is much closer. Now, in the real world a serious water company would have just said, ‘OK, you’ve got a water pipe there already, so we’ll get an engineer to pop along at a convenient time to see what’s involved and give you an estimate’.

But as more time passes I realise that the fundamentally flawed French public sector logic doesn’t work in such a simple, direct manner. That’s because it’s really all about keeping people who are basically incompetent ‘working’ in offices and off the unemployment register, so what it values is ‘dossiers’, ‘plans de masse’ and ‘plans de situation’, anything that sounds more grandiose than just a simple address and something that little people can pore over in offices to make themselves feel big and important whereas it would be cheaper and much more efficient just to get an engineer on site to get his hands dirty and take a look to see what’s involved.

You think that sounds bad? Now read on to see what happened after I’d dragged all the way down to Sarlat this afternoon in sweltering temperatures of over 30 degrees Celsius and roads filled with tourists and camping cars. The Véolia office is built on top of a concrete anthill about 50 feet high. There’s no way in on foot other than by climbing up the concrete slope to the undistinguished (and almost indistinguishable) door thoughtfully placed right on top at the back.

There’s car parking for those who know about it – except today there were no spare places, so tough luck on people like me arriving on foot and climbing all the way up in such extreme temperatures, and also anyone arriving by car who would have had to go out again, find a parking space and do exactly the same thing. When I walked through the door to my ‘rendezvous’ it turned out to be with a rather soppy young woman sitting behind a large virus (and probably bullet) proof plastic screen who refused to remove her mask and whose speech was therefore almost unintelligible, made more so by a group of overalled engineers in the background talking loudly in an animated fashion.

So by now my irritability app was pinging 50 times to the dozen. I said look, I can’t hear a word you’re saying, so she grabbed a scrappy piece of paper and wrote it down. And it got worse.

The scrappy piece of paper turned out to be a photocopied form, very badly and lazily photocopied though, on an angle of about 30 degrees with large bits missing from its edges as a result. She wrote down the things that had to be attached to it (the aforesaid ‘plan de situation’ and ‘plan de masse’) and told me that I had to take the ‘dossier’ (because that’s what it would then have become… are you still with me?) to… TERRASSON!!

I said why the hell did I have to go to Terrasson when I’d been told to come to Sarlat… why couldn’t it be dealt with here? Because Fleurac is in the Terrason office’s area, that’s why, and who told me to come to Sarlat anyway? I blew up at that point and said that originally I’d been told to go to Bergerac but there’s no point arguing with little ‘fonctionnaires’ and picked up the paper to walk out. As I went she said that she’d tell her colleague to deal with my request urgently. I replied that that’s what everyone in Véolia had been telling me for over six weeks and closed the door behind me.

So as a result of this meeting I’d found out that Véolia’s ‘client services’ in Toulouse play a blindfolded game of pin the tail on the donkey when it comes to finding which local office deals with which area. I’d also received a form (such as it was – the person responsible for it in a private company would have been sacked on the spot) to fill in that I could easily have either received by email or downloaded from the internet which instead of delivering to its destination by the same means, I’ve now got to physically take to an office in Terrasson. I truly despair of the idiocy of such a system. It’s why France will always be a financial, bureaucratic and administrative backwater. There’s no hope for it because there’s nobody with the will and political backbone to do anything about it.