I went to La Poste, the post office, yesterday to use their copying machine. It’s the closest business with a copying machine from my apartment. About half of the time the machine is out of order, but yesterday it was working.

I couldn’t find it at first. In the eleven years that I’ve lived in the neighborhood this is fourth time, I believe, that the public area has been renovated and reconfigured. Each time, the post office employees there have gotten a bit friendly, a bit more human. At least briefly. I suppose that happens in every workplace as new, more comfortable surroundings give employees an added sense of well-being.

Yesterday, though, I thought that something deeper had been going on at my post office over the years, that little by little the employees had come to see themselves (or been forced to see themselves) as offering a service to their clients and not simply as a cog in the machine of public service. Much, not all, of that has to do with the fact that that public service machine is about to become private. On March 1, La Poste will go from being a public company to being joint-stock company, albeit largely controlled by the State. The old dull, cranky, reliable postal worker is already gone, I thought as I entered the post office, since in recent times the employees have increasingly appeared to want to satisfy clients’ postal, packaging, or banking needs. Or in my case, the client’s photocopying needs.

Now when you enter this post office there is someone at a lectern-like desk who, if you require help, will direct you to the appropriate station. I didn’t walk up to him but rather into the center of the post office and looked around. He came up to me to ask what I was looking for, something that had never before happened to me in this post office. I told him that I was looking for la photocopieuse.

He then actually walked me over to the machine. When I saw that it required exact change, at 10 cents per copy, I asked where I could get change for a euro. His response: “You should try to come with exact change because we’d run out if we made change for everyone, but I think I have enough now, I’ll get it for you.” And so he did.

I left with my copies made and a sense that my post office was now a warmer place and that on the planet of customer service I had just witnessed a small step for man, a giant leap for France.

* * *

Today I went to the same post office to mail a personal letter to the U.S.. I wanted an attractive stamp rather than a sticker from the scale machine so I went up to the Mailing-Letter-Packages desk. It was either a slow mail day or the new reconfiguration of the post office is actually effective because there was only one person ahead of me and he was soon gone.

I handed my letter to the postal worker and said I needed stamps for the U.S.. She said, “I’ll show you were you can do that at the machine.” That seemed odd since I was at the stamp desk, but I suppose that she’d been told by her superior to show people how to do it at the scale machine, the postal version of “give a man a fish and he’ll have food for a day; show a man how to fish and he’ll never go hungry”: sell a man a stamp and he’ll send a letter; teach a man to make stamps and he’ll communicate with the world.

I told her that I didn’t want machine stamps I want attractive stamps, des beaux timbres.

At his she snickered, loudly, a veritable, uncontrollable laugh, into my face. She wasn’t laughing because I might have said something funny; in fact, her laugh had nothing to do with stamps themselves but rather in an attempt to put me down because I had preferred my solution to hers. I wasn’t following her script. In her script the customer tells her that he wants to send a letter and she comes to the rescue and teaches him how to use the machine so that he’ll “never go hungry.” Instead, here I was asking for my script to trump hers.

You wouldn’t think wanting an attractive stamp instead of a basic machine stamp would be so offensive to an employee of the post office who can actually sell you stamps, but it is when that employee feels that you’re asking too much. It’s the same in the grocery store, in a café or even in the lobby in your apartment building: ask for something or initiate a conversation that is not in the other’s script—that goes beyond the boundaries he has set for himself—and that person will panic.

Customer service employees are so easily destabilized by other people’s scripts that they become downright aggressive by line two. A wall is thrown up to say “You aren’t playing by my rules of what this situation is all about, so don’t expect me to cooperate easily.”

Strange as it may seem, I had in some way insulted this postal employee’s sense of efficiency. She therefore immediately reverted to the stand-by French customer service attitude whereby the affronted employee mocks the client or tries to put him down in order to brandish her power, however insignificant that power may seem on the outside.

In a sense, the fellow who provided me with change for the photocopieuse yesterday had done the same thing by insisting that he was making an exception by providing me with change and that next time I should come prepared. That may sound like a perfectly reasonable thing for him to say, and indeed he did so with courtesy, but he said it, I believe, because, too, had felt a need to assert his power, to let me know that in the future his script will trump mine.

It may sound ridiculous that a person selling stamps would laugh at me for wanting to buy stamps, but that only goes to show how ingrained the old customer service mentality is despite a fourth restructuring of the post office in eleven years. Here, the rules are the rules, and those rules are very limited and circumscribed. Caveat emptor.

My letter was heavy enough to required 1€70 in stamps, double the base rate of 85 cents for a letter overseas. Or as the postal employee put it, “1€70, because you’re over 20 grams. You can check that at the machine.”

Perhaps I’ve been overanalyzing all this. Perhaps she just had a bug up her ass.