A day in the life

Last week, I was out all week traveling in the countryside, visiting customs in and around Cholet.  One of the days, I had just arrived on site and was in the office drinking a cup of coffee with my client and the site manager (side bar - when will I ever learn to like coffee??  It's such a social thing here in France, and refusing a coffee offered by a customer is like saying "No, sorry, I don't want to spend 10 minutes chatting with you", so I always feel obligated to accept and choke it down).   But so there we all were, drinking our dirt water coffee, and all of the sudden we see eight or nine employees leaving the building at break time.  This normally does not happen because everybody wears special clothes inside, so going outside is a bit annoying because it requires getting undressed, changing clothes, etc. 

The site manager opened the window and yelled out "Hey, Jean-Paul, where are you going?" And JP replied back "We're going to see a deer".  The three of us looked at one another like "WTF??" and then I laughed and said "Well let's follow them, I want to see the deer too".

So we all trek outside in a line and Old Jean-Paul starts telling a story about how he was on his way to work that day, and it was really foggy and he couldn't see anything, and all of the sudden "WHAM".  So he pulled over and got out and realized he had hit a deer.  She wasn't moving at all, so "since no one was around to see", he hefted her up and popped her in his trunk and continued on his way to work.  And now five hours later was coming to check on her.

He opened the trunk and we all collectively leaned back a bit in case she jumped out, but nope, there she was, perfectly untouched and frozen in time. Luckily (or I guess unluckily), she had been killed upon impact, so she hadn't sat there suffering all morning, which had been one of my concerns.  His colleagues asked him what he was going to do with her, and he replied "Make steaks and sausages".  And then we all trekked back inside again.

That too is life in France, my friends.