It's been said by someone more brilliant than I that life is one big IQ test. Every day we fill in the form, and life gives us our score in the happiness we experience. Let me profile the life of a French person in high-tecque, and we can compare him or her to your IQ. The weekday begins at the crack of 9:30, when the workers race in to get their morning coffee. In offices all over La Defense, the day begins with everyone gathered round the coffee machine drinking fake cappuccinos and smoking real cigarettes. They greet each other as civilized colleagues, even when they can't stand each other...which in the case of the French is fairly often. Their hurculean effort begins at 10 but dissipates by 12:30, when they head out to a local bistro. Never do they eat at their desks, and they're gone for a full hour. The workday starts to wind down by 6:30 or 7 unless there's a crash project. But they make up for this by taking 6 weeks of vacation a year, plus 15 legal holidays. This only leaves them with 46 weekends, though. For dinner they eat fine, fresh foods with the highest-fat-content sauces they can think of. They stay up till after midnight arguing about nothing, and they don't have time in the morning to even think of jogging. But they seem to have no problem with obesity:I have yet to see cellulite on any woman under 50. They seem to have lucked out of this one. One out of 16 Frenchmen do not change their underwear every day, and an even greater percentage never wash their hands except when bathing. And an even greater percentage than that do not bathe every day. These are real facts, so you'd better pay attention as they may effect you. But they have less outbreaks of e-coli per capita than we do, so they seem to have lucked out on this one, too. They sell each other small, ugly, unreliable cars for much more than you or I would pay for a Cadillac...which due to its French heritage is big, ugly, and unreliable. Their internet knowledge is appalling, so their stock market goes neither up nor down $100 a day. Their doctors still make house calls. There are no shopping warehouses or decent malls. They seem to be unable to use voicemail. The French can't comprehend the value of imitation anything, and streamlined mass production is out of the question. They make 463 different cheeses (that's one type of cheese for every 100,000 people-- how can they expect to make a profit?), and not one of them comes in an aerosol dispenser. They also make more than 500 different wines, and because they don't let the farmers water the grapes they never get production volumes up to the point where the wine is consistent from year to year. Plus, they can't see the advantages of putting wine in a cardboard box. You can see that these are obviously stupid people who will never get ahead.