Monday, October 13, 2008
Ahh, the French
Their ability to show contempt is truly impressive. Try this for fun - go to the Air France website to check the status of an incoming flight. Type in airfrance.com. You will be redirected to airfrance.fr. Because instead of using the .com site to cater to their English-speaking customers, the goal is to make absolutely no allowance for the fact that the, for lack of a better term, lingua franca of the internet is...English. Instead, they have decided it is far more important that you visit the general website and bow to the Frenchness which you foolishly don't possess.
So you must go to the .fr site which is, you guessed it, all in French. There is, of course, no little button saying "English" to get you the English version. Because all languages are equal, so if they did that they would have to have another one saying "Czech". Instead, there are a million French links sprinkled around, talking about things like "horaires" and "voitures", which presumably take you to online patisserie-rating sites or Jerry Lewis festivals. Anyway, because I am a language genius, I figured out that "autres pays" sounds like "other place", so I clicked on it. And as we say in the US, voila! I had stumbled upon the choix du site correspondant a la zone de residence! Now I simply had to know the name of my country in French, so eventually I found Etats Unis. Which took me to airfrance.us. Ah! I should have known. Who are the Americans to own the .com suffix? Cretins.
