If you move to France, prepare for this: people will call you. A lot. I get more calls in a week in France on my landline than in a year in Germany and I am not exaggerating. Communicating with companies via email or even Whatsapp is perfectly normal, not so in France, at least not in rural France. Here, everybody loves to call you. Even if you’ve told them you’re not very good at speaking French on the phone and would prefer an email.
I once even emailed a chimney sweeper and he called me just to tell me, that he would call me again in an hour. But why would you need a French phone number at all, rather than just using your foreign one?
In rural areas online shopping is very convenient. Of course we enjoy visiting the small shops in the village, but if you need anything out of the ordinary, it’s usually easier to order online. Several times, however, I’ve been forced to enter a French phone number in order to complete my purchase. Many online forms simply refuse to accept a foreign number, even an EU one.
That’s why one of our first tasks before moving to France was to arrange a French landline with internet. This was not an easy process, I will talk about that another time, but eventually I spoke to a very helpful operator on the phone. In the final step she told me I had to provide a French phone number, in order to get a French landline phone number! This was with Orange, it might be different with other providers.
Luckily she had a workaround and suggested to enter a fictious phone number, because you’ll never actually need it for anything. Since then, whenever an online shop forces me to enter a French mobile number, which I still don’t have, I simply make one up: any 10-digit number starting with “06” works.
My landline phone, in case you haven’t seen one in a long time.
But online shopping is not the only reason to have a French number. In our rural area mobile reception is poor. We would miss a lot of calls and in case of an emergency at home we don’t want to hike up the hill to get a signal.
And of course, there will come a time when you need some kind of artisan. I’m pretty sure you’ll get a call back more quickly if you call them from a French number. People in general might be reluctant to ring back a foreign one, what’s totally understandable.
I have to go, the phone’s ringing.