Sample text no.1, pp. 64-65

One of Three Tales of Newcomer Bungles:
Bret at the Bakery
with author's comment on what went wrong:

"I was in a boulangerie, buying a loaf of bread," said Bret Moran, a banker from Boston. "It was the first time I'd ventured into a bakery on my own, with my dusty French. I was very polite and said, 'Bonjour,madame,' the way you told us last week, and ordered 'un pain de seigle, s'il vous plaît.' The boulangère wrapped it up in a tiny square of tissue paper, which she twisted together at the ends, and thrust it at me. I asked for a bag. 'Un sac, s'il vous plaît.'

"She refused! And snapped at me in a waterfall of French nastiness! The bitch! To refuse me a bag!"

"I was so hopping mad when I got out to the sidewalk, with this bare loaf in this ridiculous piece of tissue paper, that of course I forgot to watch out. Someone knocked into me. The bread fell down and rolled in the street, losing the tissue paper on the way, and ended up -- guess where -- in a dog mess."

Furious, Bret went back to the boulangerie and ordered another loaf of bread. He refused to pay for it, claiming that it was the boulangère's "fault" that the first one was ruined, and again insisted on a bag: "Un SAC! J'ai besoin d'un SAC!"

His anger triggered a French fit that made the first "waterfall" seem like a love song. He not only did not get the bag, but the boulangère screamed at him that she'd get the police if he didn't pay. And added that he should never come back to the store again.

At home he discovered that the loaf was three days old and hard as rock. "At this point, I hated not only the boulangère but all of France and everyone in it," he went on. "But not as much as my wife did. She'd had to hang around all day waiting for the plumber to fix the washing machine -- who never showed up. She'd had to cart all the wash for a family of six to the laundromat -- where she got in a row with the laundress and had to wait for five loads before she could have it washed. When I got home, she went for me -- a tantrum such as I'd never seen. She was ready to dump me and the kids for good and clear out of France right then and there. We were up half the night roaring at each other."

After a moment he added, "The next day at the office I thought my head would split open. Luckily nothing much was going on."

Bret may sound unusually bad-tempered. He's not. Lots of managers with frayed nerves at the end of a day of frustrations explode like this.

Bret's Blunders:

• He didn't make himself known to the boulangère before doing business with her.
• He didn't grasp the inappropriateness of his request (for the bag) and then devise a strategy for obtaining something he was not entitled to.
• He blamed the boulangère for something. This is always fatal. See Chapter 6.

Sample text no.2, p. 225:

Gallantry at the office

The attention given by men to women at the office can surprise an Anglo-Saxon. Mike Johnson, after his year in Paris as editorial director for Groupe Teste, wrote in Management Today, "In the office, it is always open season, at least verbally. Legs, lips, bottoms, breasts, necks and knees are fair game for the men's respectful consideration. Aside from cheek-pecking, the fooling around rarely becomes physical. Only once did I witness an exception. One of my managers playfully grabbed the left buttock of an art-department mother-of-two... there was a little yelp (more like a yes than a no) from the woman. The man explained to me and to her that he was only expressing his admiration for the roundness of the object, an unavoidable impulse on purely aesthetic grounds."