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November 29, 2005
How to lower unemployment
As everyone knows, but nobody says out loud, the primary mission of the French ANPE is to reduce the numbers of people registered as unemployed... by whatever means necessary. Basically the most difficult way of getting you out of the stats is finding you a job, so they don't try to do that. It's considerably easier to eliminate you by having you jump through silly bureaucratic hoops until you give up or get eliminated for getting caught up in one of the hoops.
Nathalie worked 7 hours this month. That's not yet enough for her to be completely off the roll. So the first thing they tried, since they know from the information they required earlier that she's a mother of three children who are at home all Wednesday, was to set up a mandatory meeting in the middle of a Wednesday. They claim it's impossible to change the meeting time once it's arranged. By definition you are not employed, so therefore your schedule is wide open. They don't even have to ask you before requiring your presence at a certain time.
Another way they get you is to make it technically difficult to get the papers you must have in order to prove that you jumped through the useless hoops. Assedic.fr has some unpleasant features, such as a useless pop-up on the cover page that Firefox of course blocks by default, and scrolling text that gets garbled in Firefox. If you're out of work on the dole but want to be able to use the site, you still have to pay the Microsoft tax.
But they outdo themselves on the page that handles getting a version of the monthly declaration you need to avoid getting thrown off the list. You do your declaration online, then they generate a PDF for your printing. Unfortunately neither Adobe Acrobat nor xpdf can actually read or print the content of the generated file. And oh, by the way, you can only go through the process and generate the file once.
When you contact their tech support, they tell you how to configure your browser to accept the pop-up.
Posted by Mark at November 29, 2005 08:42 PM
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Comments
Sounds like the job of the ANPE is to keep a person reminded of the frustrations of holding a job, so that they don't get used to a life of doing things in their own logical way. Either that or training them à leur insu to be support engineers for other crappy web services.
Posted by: Andy at December 1, 2005 07:12 PM