lager, lip reunited

When last we left our not-so-intrepid anti-hero, lager and lip remained adrift. This morning the nectar hit home.

Yesterday morning I tried in vain to call the école doctorale to see whether they had accepted, forgotten or lost my request for a fourth year. Failing to succeed to establish the secretary's continued existence, much less the status of my entreaty, I gather a posse of two, and rumbled down to accost said villain. We found her hiding in the photocopy room and beat the signed form out of her using nearby empty toner cartridges. That achieved, we issued a collective war whoop and accelerated on, tsunami-like, to the scolarité to demand instant and irrevocable enrolment. Such was our accumulated wrath, the poor creatures had little choice but to accede. Word leaking out ahead of our arrival made the cashier very accomodating, to the extent that she didn't blink when presented with a 3rd-party cheque (required in order to circumvent previous idiocies of an unnamed generally-societal french banking institution).

(See my ac- verbs and despair).

Episode next, today. I got into work early - and I mean rooster early - to get my photocopies done, then rode out to the prefecture for the cruellest step of them all. Unfortunately, I was not alone. About 40 or so of us were queued outside the front door at 5 to 9, and by the time I got my ticket I was 26th in line for the étrangers desk. Thus it was that at 10:40am I was summoned, and despite a little "proof of your scholarship" curveball, I walked out a few minutes later clutching a récépissé de demande de carte de séjour in my hot little hand.