La Greve Part Deux

Armed with a suitcase full of random papers and photocopies, I made my second sally today down to Paris' Chinese neighborhood to get my long-stay visa.
I might as well add here that we're in the midst of a crippling metro strike, and I live a good half hour metro ride away from this place. Thus why I woke up at 7AM to start frantically calling taxi companies to come pick me up--of course, this is Paris, so every person I talked to said that it was "too far" or that it just "wasn't possible."
After waiting half an hour in the street, I finally got my taxi and found myself back in the barren basement of the student "Cite Unversitaire." This must be the most stereotypical "bureaucrat" room in existence--everything is dimly lit by fluorescent lights, the walls are a pale-yellow color, and there's no decorations except a wilted plant and a sign on the mirrors on the walls saying "Do not dirty the mirrors."
And of course, since it's a metro strike, and a "suspicious package" was found on the one working line, there were no workers at the place. I joined a group of angry Turks in asking the one woman what the hell we were supposed to do with our appointment now. She assured us, in a very loud and belligerent voice, that she was "just like us" and didn't know how to handle the strike either.
Yes, I am just like her--except that I have a heart instead of some sort of robotic machine that pumps pure evil throughout my veins.
I waited three hours, which actually is completely painless by France's standards.

At the very end, everything was finally sorted out and printed and all I had to do was sign inside of the green rectangle on the form without touching the rectangle itself.
I failed.
Under the pressure to not touch the lines of the rectangle, I made some sort of big tail on the end of "Jaffe" that crossed way over the top.
The guy working with me took the paper back and looked at me incredulously.
"I told you to sign inside of the rectangle."
"I know, I'm sorry."
He audibly sighed and started to print everything all over again. That one slip added ten minutes to the process.
The next time I signed, I was visibly shaking under the pressure, but I somehow scrunched up my name into two little scribbles that just made it into the rectangle. I did it. I now have a temporary "carte de sejour." All I have to do now is go for a medical check-up in January, gloss over my €1,000 a week smack habit, and I'll finally be done with this bureaucratic nonsense.

I'm hosting a French/English conversation party at my apartment tonight, which has inspired me to make radical changes, such as wiping my bathroom mirror with Windex and squeezing a lemon into my sink. I don't know where I came up with this "lemon" idea--I feel like it's something I read in "Good Housekeeping" circa 1995, but that's the sort of knowledge I have to rely on to make my living space presentable.
And of course, I just got an email saying that probably nobody would show up the conversation due to the strikes, leaving me alone in my newly-freshened apartment with a bottle of wine and a carton of Flanby.
Flanby, by the way, is flan in a little yogurt carton--it even comes with a little pull tab that, once pulled, will make the entire blob of flan slip out of the carton at once and make a little splash onto your plate.
Who needs friends?