Notes on France: Red Buttons

As you may or may not know, I’ve been in France for the past 6 weeks. During my time there, I didn’t post anything here, so I’m going to write a few post-posts about my trip and various things in France. During my time there, it was mostly the little cultural differences that I took the most note of. Example: red buttons. Now, I can’t vouch for any other countries, but I know that growing up in the US, at least, has taught me a fear and respect for the omnipresent red button. Maybe it’s the emergency stop in an elevator, maybe it’s the alarm button in a building, maybe in milder cases it’s just a “cancel” button– wherever it’s found, there seems to be a simple rule: Don’t Touch the Red Button. Seriously, you don’t want to go there. Alarms, bells and whistles, the police, Something that you don’t want to happen will happen if you press that button, so it’s best to just leave well enough alone unless the situation is dire. As I discovered my first few weeks abroad, this is not the case in France. The school I went to was about a 25-minute walk from the place I was staying, so I sometimes walked and sometimes took the bus. My first time on the bus, as I was checking my maps and watching every street that went past, determined not to miss my stop, I realized that I didn’t know how to call for the bus to stop. There was no convenient cord to pull on, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I started watching the other passengers, looking for an answer that I found quickly enough – a button! I could see the man press a button on a post, and sure enough, “Arret Demandé” appeared at the front of the bus. I looked for a button in my area, and found one, except…it was red. I watched some more people, and sure enough, seemed to me that the red button was the way to go. Now, logically, it was easy for me to tell myself, “Okay, press the red button when you want to get off the bus,” but it was inexplicably difficult for me to actually press that button. There was even a little picture on the button of a man getting off a bus, but I still had a feeling that something bad would happen when I pressed the button. It didn’t. Even armed with the bus experience, I found myself in a similar situation just last week, in Paris. I was staying at a friend’s apartment, and I was going out to walk around a bit. The apartment entrance has two doors with codes, one to the building, and a set of double-doors to the alley in general. I left the building, got to the alley door, and pulled the handle to go out. The door didn’t open. I tried pushing, still nothing. I looked at the other door. Where the handle should have been was a black contraption with, you guessed it, a big red button in the middle. Now, unlike the bus situation there was no convenient picture, no people around to observe – just me, in an alley, with a red button. I spent about a minute trying the other handle again, looking around on the door for any other opening mechanism, before I finally decided it was probably the red button. I admit, I considered whether or not I could open the latch with a credit card in an attempt to avoid that button, such has it been ingrained in me that Red Buttons Are Bad. Even after coming to the conclusion that it had to be that button, I stood looking at the door for probably another minute, steeling myself, and even as I pressed the button, I was cringing, sure that alarms would sound any second. Again, they didn’t, and it seemed just as illogical to me then as it does now that such a little thing as a red button can override reasonable thinking to the extent that it did for me. Maybe I’ll take comfort in the fact that somewhere, someday, a Frenchman will press an unmarked red button and set off all manner of alarms, because he wasn’t raised with an (un?)healthy paranoia of red buttons.