Tomorrow's Forecast: Partly Striky

RATP, the Paris transit authority, lets you sign up to receive e-mail or text message alerts when there's a disruption in public transportation. Late last night, I received an e-mail saying that, due to a "social movement" (read: "strike"), traffic on the suburban train lines will be disrupted on Thursday. Since I rarely take the suburban trains except to go out to P and A's house, I wasn't too concerned.

This morning, however, when I was out running errands and going to meet a friend for lunch, I noticed dreaded words flashing across the info screens in the métro station:

Work stoppage [read: "strike"]. Following the notices by the unions CGT, CFDT and FO for the day of May 22, 2008, RATP is predicting: normal or near-normal traffic on all the métro lines.

Next screen:

Work stoppage [read: well, you know]. RER [the combination suburban/intracity train lines] Line A: Normal or near-normal traffic. RER Line B: 1 train out of 2 running, interconnection between networks suspended at Gare du Nord. Bus and
Tramway: Normal or near-normal traffic.

Whew! It doesn't look like this one will be too bad. The bad ones are where you have maybe 1 out of 4 trains running on certain lines, and it gets so crowded that not only is everyone in the train belly to back (and not in a good way), there are people doing crazy things like standing on the backs of the seats or in the (3-inch deep) window frames.

The other good news is that I'll be working at home all day tomorrow, so I shouldn't need to go anywhere near any normally or abnormally functioning trains.

The main line that will be affected, RER B, is the principal north-south axis and goes to both Orly and Charles de Gaulle airports, so a lot of travellers (as well as many working-class folk) will be very inconvenienced tomorrow. Someone told me recently that when Disney decided to build its European theme park outside of Paris, one of the points it negotiated with the government is that there would never be any strikes on the train line serving Disneyland Paris. I have no idea if that's really true (and I never paid attention in prior strikes), but traffic is supposed to be normal on RER A tomorrow, so strike or no strike, we can still all go see Mickey speak French if we want!

UPDATE: My friend Isabelle's 9 (or so?) year-old son declared a homework strike today, in response to his teacher's stike. Read about it here.