Bridgers...

I recently wrote about the French ability to play around with their RTT in order to get the most out of the national labour legislation. Well if you are lucky enough to be based in France at that time, May is THE month to practice your skills.
As a matter of fact, the month of May is critical for two reasons in my home country:

1. On the contrary to the UK, every company has the same holiday year. I mean that any employee needs to spend his 5-week holidays within the June 1st-May 31st period. And you know how things go... You always wait for the last minute to get rid of your allowance, especially with the lovely sunny spring days coming up. This means that early May every worker realizes that he still have a few days off to take before the end of the month if he does not want to lose them... And so start the optimization.
2. There are in May a series of really appreciable public holidays: May 1st is off, so is May 8th... And suddenly the optimization becomes even more thrilling.

There is a even a specific terminology for these optimised holidays: we call that "Faire le pont" (literally, to do the bridge, to bridge). The concept is in fact very visual. Picture yourself in front of your calendar. Thursday is a public holiday. Saturday is the beginning of week-end. Great, you have two pillars to build your bridge. You just have to take your Friday off to enjoy a 4 day-week-end.

A viaduct? Well, as you may know a viaduct is a long bridge, so this is the same kind of holiday building skills that you need to action, except that you are forced to spend two days to link you Wednesday to your Saturday.

If you bear in mind these national skills and our competencies to demonstrate against any reconsideration of our existing public holidays, you suddenly understand why there is no point trying to get hold of someone in Paris in May: he is very likely to be off. Probably bridging in Normandy.