Met four very different Justice of the Peaces yesterday. In one case, I suspect the furthest-right party in the country just got my normally-pinko vote because of how nice the ones at the local MP's office were. In the other case it's a good thing this isn't one of those states where everybody walks around packing heat, because I'd have blown kneecaps off at a minimum. It isn't a good idea to antagonize a lady in her eighth month of pregnancy.
It had to do with the letter dissolving the PACS with Bluebird, which, going as it is to France, had to be in French. So far so explicable. I'm sure the French will raise their whole separate suite of roadblocks, France being what it is, but for now they're not the problem. The French consulate needed me to get a JP to witness my signature of the document. I figured that would probably be fine - just do it as a stat dec.
Now, the odds of finding a JP anywhere in Australia, especially New South Wales (the most populous state, and apparently one of the worst for second language education) that speaks even the basic French that was involved in the letter are probably less than 1%, because this is a monolingual dump. This is the only country I'm aware of where educated people who consider themselves intellectuals can be monolingual. Wholly monolingual. Chestnuts about stupid American monolinguals don't stand up to scrutiny; I've never met an American who couldn't fathom the basic concept of say, Spanish or French existing through a few words, a few lessons. I've certainly never met an American with pretensions to intellectualism like that. Basically, I'm talking about having enough knowledge of another language to make fun of it. Not even that is on the cards here.
That rant aside (for the moment), I understood there was just about no chance of me finding a JP within a day's drive that could understand French. But I expected a stat dec would be okay, or just a little JP stamp next to my signature on a French letter (yes, the condom euphemism has struck me too), given all the consulate needed was a validation of my signature.
Was it, fuck. As far as the first two JPs were concerned, anyways. Long term readers remember my frequent struggles with Belgian Kafkaism. I can sincerely state, and I've thought long and hard about this, that all of the Kafkaesque bureaucratic nonsense in Belgium that I ever butted heads with never quite equalled the idiocy of the over-pickled middle-aged painted bimbo (she looked like one of the blonde bitches from Muriel's Wedding with the addition of a slightly updated haircut and about 30 years) at the courthouse explaining to me over and over that the content of the stat dec didn't matter to her, but she couldn't accept the content because it was in French. She ended up in that rhetorical hole when I offered to write down a side-by-side English/French translation on the stat dec, so that it could be ensured, one assumes, that I wasn't writing down a violent anarchist manifesto involving blowing up her house and workplace in my kooky man-man language that she would be consenting to with her signature.
To be fair to her, she called in one of her colleagues to back her up - an incredibly lazy sack of clock-watching shit the F-word and I had already had to suffer when getting some docs certified for our mortgage - which he did by saying it was my problem with the French consulate, and I should sort it out with them. Expressed himself rather rudely, which I'm not too sore about, given he had that sort of swollen non-sun pinkiness that betrays he's gonna die of something heart-related soon, so it's not as though the world will have to bear him for long.
Finally - since this was all at the local courthouse, and you never know when I'll run into them in less auspicious bureaucratic circumstances - I thanked them very kindly for all of their help (which felt quite good, since I doubt even those sorts of mouth-breathing inert troglodytes could have missed the sarcasm) and left. If you read the last entry about Bluebird, you may appreciate that yesterday was a difficult day. I was, after all, carrying out a step that severed the last lingering paper-tie to a fairly unfortunate chapter in my life, but which my crocodile brain was warning might end up messily. So as I left the courthouse, I was distraught that everything hadn't been tied up. But I decided to try again, and went to the only other JPs I could find, at the local state MP's office. I was feeling a little iffy about it, preparing myself for another round of bullocks, especially given the political context of him representing the furthest-right party on offer, and me being a foreign dago with a stat dec in a foreign dago language.
Was it iffy? Was it, fuck. The lovely ladies there didn't bat an eyelash. They told me the same thing as the courthouse JP - the content doesn't matter, a JP just signs off on your signature - but followed that idea to its natural conclusion - so it doesn't matter that it's in French - instead of derrrrrrrrr. I wrote it out, rang a little bell when it was done, and another JP came out and excused herself for, I suppose, not having instantly appeared out of thin air, because they'd been having a little morning tea with mudpies (a sort of chocolate cupcake). I told her she was lucky; she looked at my belly and said "actually, I think I'd better get you one too."
Short version: first people I saw were impossible, obstructionist civil servant cunts happy to waste my time and theirs because French made their brains explode; the next set were employees of a right-wing, nationalistic party who helped me as instantly as they could without bending the space-time continuum, and gave me a cupcake.
It had to do with the letter dissolving the PACS with Bluebird, which, going as it is to France, had to be in French. So far so explicable. I'm sure the French will raise their whole separate suite of roadblocks, France being what it is, but for now they're not the problem. The French consulate needed me to get a JP to witness my signature of the document. I figured that would probably be fine - just do it as a stat dec.
Now, the odds of finding a JP anywhere in Australia, especially New South Wales (the most populous state, and apparently one of the worst for second language education) that speaks even the basic French that was involved in the letter are probably less than 1%, because this is a monolingual dump. This is the only country I'm aware of where educated people who consider themselves intellectuals can be monolingual. Wholly monolingual. Chestnuts about stupid American monolinguals don't stand up to scrutiny; I've never met an American who couldn't fathom the basic concept of say, Spanish or French existing through a few words, a few lessons. I've certainly never met an American with pretensions to intellectualism like that. Basically, I'm talking about having enough knowledge of another language to make fun of it. Not even that is on the cards here.
That rant aside (for the moment), I understood there was just about no chance of me finding a JP within a day's drive that could understand French. But I expected a stat dec would be okay, or just a little JP stamp next to my signature on a French letter (yes, the condom euphemism has struck me too), given all the consulate needed was a validation of my signature.
Was it, fuck. As far as the first two JPs were concerned, anyways. Long term readers remember my frequent struggles with Belgian Kafkaism. I can sincerely state, and I've thought long and hard about this, that all of the Kafkaesque bureaucratic nonsense in Belgium that I ever butted heads with never quite equalled the idiocy of the over-pickled middle-aged painted bimbo (she looked like one of the blonde bitches from Muriel's Wedding with the addition of a slightly updated haircut and about 30 years) at the courthouse explaining to me over and over that the content of the stat dec didn't matter to her, but she couldn't accept the content because it was in French. She ended up in that rhetorical hole when I offered to write down a side-by-side English/French translation on the stat dec, so that it could be ensured, one assumes, that I wasn't writing down a violent anarchist manifesto involving blowing up her house and workplace in my kooky man-man language that she would be consenting to with her signature.
To be fair to her, she called in one of her colleagues to back her up - an incredibly lazy sack of clock-watching shit the F-word and I had already had to suffer when getting some docs certified for our mortgage - which he did by saying it was my problem with the French consulate, and I should sort it out with them. Expressed himself rather rudely, which I'm not too sore about, given he had that sort of swollen non-sun pinkiness that betrays he's gonna die of something heart-related soon, so it's not as though the world will have to bear him for long.
Finally - since this was all at the local courthouse, and you never know when I'll run into them in less auspicious bureaucratic circumstances - I thanked them very kindly for all of their help (which felt quite good, since I doubt even those sorts of mouth-breathing inert troglodytes could have missed the sarcasm) and left. If you read the last entry about Bluebird, you may appreciate that yesterday was a difficult day. I was, after all, carrying out a step that severed the last lingering paper-tie to a fairly unfortunate chapter in my life, but which my crocodile brain was warning might end up messily. So as I left the courthouse, I was distraught that everything hadn't been tied up. But I decided to try again, and went to the only other JPs I could find, at the local state MP's office. I was feeling a little iffy about it, preparing myself for another round of bullocks, especially given the political context of him representing the furthest-right party on offer, and me being a foreign dago with a stat dec in a foreign dago language.
Was it iffy? Was it, fuck. The lovely ladies there didn't bat an eyelash. They told me the same thing as the courthouse JP - the content doesn't matter, a JP just signs off on your signature - but followed that idea to its natural conclusion - so it doesn't matter that it's in French - instead of derrrrrrrrr. I wrote it out, rang a little bell when it was done, and another JP came out and excused herself for, I suppose, not having instantly appeared out of thin air, because they'd been having a little morning tea with mudpies (a sort of chocolate cupcake). I told her she was lucky; she looked at my belly and said "actually, I think I'd better get you one too."
Short version: first people I saw were impossible, obstructionist civil servant cunts happy to waste my time and theirs because French made their brains explode; the next set were employees of a right-wing, nationalistic party who helped me as instantly as they could without bending the space-time continuum, and gave me a cupcake.
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