A lazy fortune-teller’s guide to registering with the French tax office
Just put the beers down and step back slowly
Conceptual artists in conditional semantics have taken over my local craft brewery.
Looking back, the signs were there for all to see. Previously I’d pop in to collect my usual six beers – as an annual crowdfunder of the business, I am entitled to half a dozen bottles from their range each month, which I suppose makes me a ‘regular’ at the bar, albeit a monthly one – and the staff member on duty would greet me with a simple “Bonjour, monsieur.”
Then on one occasion, one of them surprised me with a self-effacing question concerning his skillset as a customer-facing employee of the brewery, thus:
“Bonjour, monsieur. Can I help you?”
I don’t know. Can he? What was this? Some kind of pre-service survey? Was I expected to rate his service record out of five stars before we’d even started?
I gave it some thought and in due course replied that I had full confidence in his likelihood to be able to help me, given that he had demonstrated this satisfactorily on at least two previous occasions. The oddness of the query continued to churn in my mind as I wandered home with my six bottles of donation-financed beer rattling in my backpack.
A month later, they stepped up the conditionals:
“Bonjour, monsieur. What would you like?”
Naturally I waited for him to finish his sentence. But after a few seconds of silence he simply repeated “What would you like?” without outlining the circumstances that might apply.
How could I answer such an open-ended query? I explained that if I did not enjoy drinking beer and knew nobody else who did, then the one thing I would not like is any of their beer. I then ran through a number of alternative scenarios in which I would or would not like various other things, but they fell on deaf ears as he had already turned to serve another customer.
On my monthly visit this week, I was greeted with the following mind-bender:
“Bonjour monsieur. What will it be?”
This caused me to stagger backwards aghast, such was the extraordinary nature of the question. It was bad enough that I had to wrestle with conjecture and conditionals; now I was expected to see into the future. There I was, merely wanting to pick up some prepaid IPA, and the barman was trying to pull me through a tear in the fabric of the time-space continuum.
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