A Commuter in Paris

When I first got to Boston, I thought riding the T was a lot of fun.

Friends might suggest strolling along the Charles to get to cafés near MIT or walking up Mass. Ave to eat at restaurants in Porter Square, but I was always the one who’d recommend the MBTA.

“Why don’t we just take the T?” I’d suggest with the whiney, sluggish air of a jaded subway commuter, despite the fact that I was actually very far from being one. In my suburban hometown in California, Mitsubishi Galants and Ford Tauruses were the only way to get to Best Buy.

But that was the past. From the very beginning of college, I decided I’d always try to evince that cute, love-hate relationship with the Red Line that seemed so characteristic of the cool, commuting city-slickers I’d seen in the movies.

My unsuspecting friends and I would find ourselves cramped in a small car, clickety-clacking a few meters underground in a dark tunnel. Now that was a good trip.

But like any drug, I soon needed a bigger fix.

So I decided to go to Paris: fourteen lines of pure Metro, speeding and screeching under some of the world’s most celebrated monuments.

My first days were wonderful. After trying several lines, I found that my absolute favorite was the 14. Driven entirely by some sort of computer-sensory device, the 14 didn’t need an annoying front car with a driver obfuscating my view of the underground.

In the very front car was a large window, tilted slightly outward. I leaned my forehead against it and the train started to move. Faster and faster it went until we began to soar through the tunnel, moving so fast that the dim lights shining down from the street began to blur.

I was flying through the Metro.

But soon, I began to realize that the Metro, wonderful as it may be, is the beacon of France’s incredibly frustrating bureaucracy. The flying buttresses of this bureaucracy à la française? Its Metro maids.

They sit in droves wearing freshly pressed uniforms in glass kiosks underneath the city, swiftly tapping their Bic pens, keeping patrons in their proper place.

“I’m sorry,” one once said to me mechanically as I tried to buy a new microchip Metro pass, (my old paper pass was being phased out by the city), “But rules are rules. You’ll just have to go to a different station, unless you want to fill out this form, mail it in, and wait four-to-six weeks.”

“But in four-to-six weeks the month will be over,” I said.

“The rules are rules,” she retorted.

Only France, I reminded myself, would decide to change the way riders access the subway in the middle of summer, when flocks of tourists traipse through the underground.

I left her behind the counter and got on a train across Paris. Arriving at the city’s largest station, I tried again. “There is nothing I can do, sir,” I heard. “People like you come in here day after day, day after day. And I can only help those with proper identification. You’ll just have to come back with your photo ID next week.”

As I got back on the train headed home, I realized that it wasn’t just glass that had separated me from these attendants. It had been an added impersonal, inconvenient, paper barricade of bureaucracy.

Max Weber said that “when those subject to bureaucratic control seek to escape the influence of the existing bureaucratic apparatus, this is normally possible only by creating an organization of their own which is equally subject to bureaucratization.”

But why anyone would ever be sick enough to recreate an apparatus that would send a young, unsuspecting, somewhat innocent commuter zigzagging underneath a foreign city in search of a little metro pass has always befuddled me.

That was, however, until I discovered the joys of bureaucratic control myself—that summer I worked in a Parisian office that found shelter, food, and jobs for the city’s homeless. With all of our clients in precarious situations, it felt good locating someone a place to sleep for the night or printing out someone’s very first resume.

But sometimes the people we served were rude, inappropriately demanding, or just belligerently drunk at 11 o’clock in the morning. And it was certain elements of bureaucracy, I found, that got me through these toughest cases.

I started out using token bureaucratic phrases on our disgruntled clients such as, “The rules are rules” and “There is nothing I can do, sir.”

I soon expanded into, “If I could take a picture of you every time you did that I could prove you wrong” and “Do you have any respect for this institution?” And someday maybe I’ll even figure out just exactly how to say “Don’t even get me started on you, sir—it’s only 11 o’clock in the morning.”

Finally, through these mild French send-offs and bureaucratic forms of address, I had joined the ranks of the Metro Meter Maid. Phrase by phrase, rule by rule, I built my own bureaucracy.