Roger Rolland's battle with French bureaucracy to prove he's alive.

Ah bureaucracy.

Don't you just love it?

Of course it's everywhere, but perhaps the French are masters of it.

Or should that be the most adept at making a mess of it?

Just ask Roger Rolland.

Roger Rolland (screenshot TF1 news)

He's very much alive - something to which his family, friends and now television viewers in France can attest.

But French bureaucracy, it seems, has had a hard time believing it and has certainly needed some convincing.

At the end of May the 67-year-old received a call from his local chemist telling him that the social security office had been in touch informing him they were refusing to reimburse the cost of supplying a prescribed medicine a week earlier because...get this...Rolland was dead.

"It certainly gave me something to think about and I had to keep asking my wife to reassure me I was still alive," he told TF1 news with something approaching a smile on his face.

But as he was to discover, proving to French bureaucracy that he was still alive was far from being a laughing matter and would be harder than he thought.

First of all he made his way down to the local health insurance office where he repeated what his chemist had told him.

After plenty of hunting around, an employee discovered that somehow the death certificate of another person had made its way into his file and there had obviously been an administrative error.

As the daily newspaper France Soir reports, the error was rectified immediately and Rolland was able to return home safe in the knowledge that French bureaucracy knew he was alive.

Wrong!

A couple of weeks later the pensions office sent a letter to his home, addressed to his heirs.

Rolland was on the blower immediately to explain that there had been a mix up and...well let's allow him to take up the story as to what happened next.

"The person the other end of the line told me that I would have to provide a certificate proving I was still alive," he said.

"So I went to the town hall to see if one could be supplied...only to be told that no such certificate existed."

While Rolland was busy trying to acquire some sort of non-existent official document to prove he was alive, his wife, Josette, took matters into her own hands.

She rang the pensions office, managed to get hold of the person who had sent the letter to her husband's heirs and was told to, "Have him sign a sworn statement (une attestation sur l’honneur) that he's still alive."

"It was surrealist," Josette told France Soir.

Quite.

End of story?

Not exactly.

The pensions office now had their records straight, but Rolland thought it perhaps wise to contact the office handling the supplementary pension fund to which he was also entitled - just in case.

And that was definitely a smart move, because according to their records, he had been dead since February!

While her husband remains somewhat phlegmatic about the whole mix-up Josette is less understanding.

'It's still amazing that the social security office which made the error in the first place, didn't bother to inform the other departments," she told France Soir.

"If something similar happened to someone more fragile and less able to understand bureaucratic red tape, it could well end up with their being dead - officially and for real."

Déclaré mort par erreur

Hassan Ayaf - a man with two valid French driving licences

Whenever some sort of bureaucratic balls-up occurs you can be certain that somewhere along the line it's going to have repercussions for Joe Public - or in the following case, Hassan Ayaf.

The 36-year-old father-of-three lives the town of Belaruc-les-Bains, a half-hour's drive from the southern French city of Montpellier.

And that's important to the tale because Ayaf operates bulldozers for a living and as a consequence has to be able to travel from building site to building site without any difficult.

In other words he needs his driving licence.

French driving licence (permis de conduire), car registration document (carte grise) and car insurance (carte verte) - from Wikipedia

But in January last year he received a letter in the post telling him that he had lost his licence.

As he told the regional daily Midi Libre, Ayaf felt that, "His world had fallen apart" as no driving licence equalled no job.

What made the whole thing more incomprehensible, as far as he was concerned, was that he thought he still had enough points left on his licence.

In France a person possessing a full driving licence (or permis de conduire) has 12 points.

Whenever an infraction occurs a certain number of points are lost until at zero (obviously) the licence is withdrawn.

"I didn't understand," he told the paper. "All I did was drive without a seat belt."

But that didn't help his cause in the slightest as his licence had gone and in spite of writing to the local administration insisting that some sort of mistake had been made, he was obliged to wait the required six months by law before he was able to apply to retake his driving test.

"It was a difficult time," he said. "I had to rely on family and friends to drive me to different building sites and often I remained there over the weekend."

In June he received the green light to begin the process of retaking his test - the theory and the practical parts - which lasted until January this year when he passed.

And that meant that Ayaf was now considered a "novice" with, as is the case with all recently-qualified drivers, just six of those precious points to his name and the possibility to gain the remaining six points over a two or three year period.

But wait - this is where Monsieur or Madame French Bureaucracy stepped in to admit its "mea culpa".

Because in February Ayaf received another official letter informing him that the cancellation of his original driving licence had now been quashed.

That's right, he is now the certified holder of two valid driving licences; one as a novice (with six points) and the other as a now re-instated longtime driver (with three points).

Vive la France. Vive la bureaucratie!