Velib

It’s official, the French and the internet are incompatible.

A key example is the Velib bicycle hire scheme in Paris.

If I had a room full of 80 year old Australians speccing a website/app/hardware system for consumer use I couldn’t have done worse.

The app is used only to find a bike and nothing else.

The website, which is in French only, has the most convoluted payment scheme known to mankind.

When you have finished with that you are emailed a number (which has various interchangeable names) and you must remember a PIN that you entered.

What you do with these is a mystery. My latest hypothesis is that you must enter them into the kiosk at the bike hire stations.

But that’s a guess I just tested.

I went to the kiosk, chose English as my language du jour and entered my numbers.

Halfway through the thing reverted to French but I managed to finish entering numbers using my lingering French knowledge and voilà; velocipede!

They can’t do bikes either, for what it counts. What a piece of crap.

But on the other hand, the left one, no helmets, a complete disregard for traffic lights, no traffic police, and bars coming out of the wazoo with more smoking areas than otherwise.

I call it evens…