Black Thursday

Most of us have heard it at least once : "French are famous for their wine, their cheese and their strikes"...

Today had been dubbed "Black Thursday" by the media..... The government having recently announced that it would be reforming the very controversial retirement system of a certain sector of the public service (mainly concerning the public transportation sector) was getting ready to face major gronge. The employees of the SNCF and the RATP (the national train company and the national subway company respectively) not happy of letting go of their (quite comfortable) retirement special regimes had announced that all trains, subways, buses and tramways would be on strike on Thursday October 18th all across the country. To give you an idea of what this would mean: only 47 of 700 daily trains would run today... a major national strike... a stike to end all strikes... THE BIG KAHUNA....

It must be mentioned that in Paris public transportation is as necessary as the air we breathe. It's considered suicide to take your car on any given day to get from A to B and plain stupid if doing this during rush hours...on a strike day. You might as well walk, you'll probably get to your destination faster. And for some even that is not a possibility if like so many who work in Paris you live in the outer suburbs where only taking a train will get you to the city in less than 2 hours....

So slowly but surely we prepared for the fatidic day. People either resigned to leaving home by car at 4am and the office at 3pm to avoid the bumper-to-bumper 4 hour traffic jams or taking a day off their holidays to stay home... some managed to organize car pool-ing plans ... I even heard of companies renting bikes for all their employees because it would be cheaper than closing for the day... Needless to say taking the Velib would fall under the "bad idea" category since finding free slots in the Velib' parking lots would be nothing short of miraculous... I opted for walking to work this morning... it took me 1.20 hour but the weather was nice and sunny so I didn't mind.

Anyway... we all prepared in our own way for France to be paralyzed......

...... and then Sarkozy pulled off one of the best "wag the dog" moves in recent years.

Instead of being bombarded with minute to minute coverage on the hassels and troubles of the more than 4 million parisians trying to get to work this morning there was only one subject on everyone's mouth and in every newspaper's front page: this was the story that pushed the strikes back to page 8 news.....

Gotta give it to him on mastering the fine art of celebrity gossip... :)

- F