Photo by Akshay Chauhan on Unsplash

By Simon Cox

I stood huddled with a couple of friends, directly outside the door. Apparently, someone had come out and told them to wait outside just a few minutes before I had shown up. It was a little cold, especially for the end of the school year, but it wasn’t too bad.

Turns out, I had actually passed this building hundreds of times in the car. But I never noticed it. This was the most boring, bleak building I’d ever seen. It was a grey brick rectangle, its windows’ curtains drawn, and a modest patch of grass separating it from the sidewalk. The only defining feature at all was the white plastic sign, reading, in black, blocky letters, “Alliance Francaise.”

So I, my three friends, and a handful of strangers waited on the lawn for our chance to earn our DELF B1 diplomas. Basically, it would prove your ability to hold a basic conversation in French, which I could sometimes maybe kind of do. Why did I want this? I don’t know, but I would have had to be at school otherwise. So here I was, at about 10 am on a weekday.

A lady in a suit quickly popped her head out the door. She said a quick sentence in French. She gestured backward with one hand. Then she disappeared back inside. The entire interaction couldn’t have taken more than two seconds. I still don’t know why I was so surprised that she spoke French to me, but for whatever reason, I was, and I completely missed what she said. Thankfully, someone else in the crowd had keener ears than me and understood her message, which I presume was something like “It’s your turn,” and began walking inside.

I entered, and followed the sign saying to please complete the COVID-19 screening. Or, to be more accurate to the French translation, the COVID ten-nine screening. The screening had an English option, thankfully. I breezed through it in a minute or so, until I reached the last box: 

“Tick the box if either:

1: You are experiencing symptoms of COVID-19,

Or,

2: You have received a negative result from a rapid antigen test within the last 14 days.”

This had me stumped for a while. I ticked the box. It said I was clear. I forgot about it. But… why?

The lobby was a room with some plastic chairs and some posters for other French certifications. Another lady in a suit walked up to me with a clipboard. “Quel est ton prénom?” she asked. Again, I didn’t understand at all. So I mustered up all the courage and spoke my favourite French word, “Huh?”

“Quel est ton prénom?” she asked again, less patiently. 

I got one word that time. It sounded like it was pronounced “pronon.” I didn’t know what a “pronon” was, but “non” is “noun” in French, so my best guess was she meant “pronoun.” Which is a weird thing to ask when it appears that it is the one piece of information that you are gathering, but I was not going to keep this lady waiting. So I gestured to her clipboard and said in English, “Oh, you can just put ‘he/him’ for me.”

There was a long silence after that. Everybody turned. On the upside, the lady no longer looked impatient, but simply confused. All eyes were on me.

In case you find yourself in this situation, “prénom” is French for “first name,” which makes much more sense as a standalone question for an attendance form.

Fifteen minutes later and I was slumped in one of the lobby chairs. My friends still hadn’t stopped giggling about my new nickname, “he/him.” A handful of strangers sat in various other chairs using their phones. The greeter continued to welcome newcomers as they trickled in. One guy about my age sat at a white plastic fold-out table facing the corner, using a computer. Most people waiting were pretty bored, but I was sufficiently entertained watching that one guy. In short, what he was doing was gaming. But that word doesn’t do this guy justice. He was leaning into the screen, which was a standalone monitor easily thrice the size of a laptop screen. His fingers clacked feverishly on his rainbow-lit keyboard, his enormous headphones rested soundly on his head, his computer tower – yes, a literal tower, the same size as that of an office PC, in the waiting room of a test center – whirred and whooshed and buzzed constantly. No, this guy was not merely gaming. This guy was grinding. I only had to wait about twenty minutes for my test. So what could have possibly made this guy think that it would be a good idea to bring an entire gaming setup to the test center? Other people might say that he probably had to wait there for multiple hours to get picked up, or maybe he was from a neighbouring building where the power went out. The people who say that are unsurprisingly also the kinds of people that have never even beaten the Ender Dragon.

I didn’t have long to think about it before it was my turn to do the oral test. The idea was that we, a batch of roughly five people, would each go to smaller rooms where individual testers and testees would have to speak in French to reach a consensus on a small selection of imaginary conflicts. I didn’t have too much of a preference, so I picked one mostly at random: I was to be a child arguing for why I shouldn’t have to clean my room that day. The tester would be the parent. We started off and I very quickly realized that I had picked a bad topic.

“I have lots of other responsibilities,” I said in French.
“So do I, but I clean the house all the time and don’t complain about it.”
“Well, can I do it when I have more time, so I will no longer be complaining about it?”
“No.”

It wasn’t that either of us lacked the skill to debate in French, the characters in the argument just had directly opposing goals. I wouldn’t have been able to find a solution to this argument in English. With all logical points of discussion and possible compromise spent after about thirty seconds, I still had multiple remaining minutes to fill. So, with all the French I had left in me, I went on conversational strike and delayed the task inevitably.
“Maybe I can clean my room every other day.”
I checked the time.
“What chores will you do during your days off?”
I checked the time.
“I’ll… just… keep the room extra clean and not make it dirty in the first place.”
I checked the time.
“Isn’t that what you already do? Your room will need cleaning every day regardless.”
I checked the time. Five seconds left.
“Uhh… okay.”
Silence.
“Okay?” the tester asked.
“Yeah.”
“Oh. So… you’ll clean your room?”
“Uhh… yeah.”
This was clearly the first time anyone had resolved the conflict like that. Thankfully, the goal was not to win the argument. It was just to speak fluently in French, which I did. Kind of.
“Okay… well… You’re… Uhh… You’re good to go, then.”

An hour and a half later, I was back in the lobby, having had some fresh air and a hamburger. The same guy was still grinding RLcraft in the exact same position as before. I recounted test stories with my friends. Then we all went into another room for the written portion of the test.

The rules were simple enough: The written test would be an essay which we would have an hour to write. Its grade would be worth half of the overall grade of the DELF. There were a few other ground rules, said the instructor. No phones, she said, as she pointed to a sign with a silhouette of a cell phone with a red line through it. No drinks, she said, pointing to a drink with a line through it. And no food, she said, pointing not to a hamburger with a line through it, but a croissant with a line through it. A croissant!

On the call to start, I flipped open my booklet. The burst of crinkling sounds around me indicated that everyone else did too, but I was too focused on my own booklet to see.

“Marie is a shy French student who is considering studying abroad,” read the sheet, “write her a letter with your advice and encouragement.”

Easy enough. When I’m not put on the spot, I can twist my limited array of known French words into almost anything. I was done way before the time was up – and I mean proofread, re-proofread, and re-re-proofread.

I left to meet my friends outside, passing by the gaming guy (who was still gaming) on the way. Funny to think that I would technically be more out of place than him were I holding a croissant.
“That wasn’t too bad.”
“No, not for something worth half of the overall DELF grade, not at all!”
“What advice did you give to Marie?”
“Ah, I just said to go where you can do tourism and also focus on studying.”
“Yeah, I said a pretty similar thing.”
The third friend raised an eyebrow.
“Why would she be studying at the beach?” he asked.
“The beach?” I asked. There was a long pause as my other two friends also looked inquisitively at the third.
“Yes. The beach,” he responded, slightly exasperated, “which was what, you know, the entire essay was about?”

The three of us looked at each other. We had some bad news to break.