This is a new one for me.
Right now, I’m waiting for my flight back to Phoenix. As usual, I had outbound border formalities here in Paris.
In this world where we assume every interaction with law enforcement is tracked in a database, the French police somehow had no record of my arrival six weeks ago.
I knew something was amiss when the officer started to flip slowly through the pages, but when she asked if I had another passport, I started to get a little nervous. She didn’t have an arrival record in the computer, and she couldn’t find the entry stamp in my passport. The latter part didn’t exactly surprise me, since the police in Paris can be somewhat hit or miss about stamping passports.
All’s well that ends well, though. She asked if I could produce a confirmation of my arrival flight, so I showed her the e-mail from Delta on my phone, and that was good enough.
While having breakfast, I flipped through my passport and noticed there was, in fact, an entry stamp from last month. In defense of the police officer, it was somewhat hard to read. The fact that she bothered to look at all put her easily in the top few percentile of French police officers in terms of diligence.
