Recently, a marching band chanted his name on a station platform. Children offered him drawings, women proposed to him, others praised his lyricism: “a mixture of Victor Hugo and Pierre Palmade”. At 51, Eric Suquet, a father living on the Côte d’Azur, met with success at the controls of his TGV Nice-Paris for having shown eloquence, by embellishing with his prose the standard welcome message for drivers. .
“You have entered another dimension but don’t worry, everything is under control. » Eric Suquet, to Nice-Paris travelers
“We entered the high-speed line at the scheduled time. All devices are working normally and I can finally whip the 20,000 or so horses locked up in the motor cars…” Looking at the rails, more rarely at his cheat sheet, he delivers his text into the handset of the data transmission telephone in his cabin. “You have entered another dimension but don’t worry, everything is under control”he says, between Aix and Marseille on the fastest section at 320 km/h, “to make the effect spectacular”. In the event of fog, his keen sense of staging leads him to imagine dragons and witches in the white landscape.
When his train was full, Eric de Nice (his nickname) “the chance to reach 1,000 people, 500 per train”. So he takes advantage of this platform, as big as half an Olympia, to “distil positive energy”. In the vein of Dale Carnegie, the author of the bestselling How to make friends (1936), he encourages his passengers to turn off their mobile phones: “From these tiny screens, which are only your prisons, free yourself, regain control of your emotions (…). You can simply turn to your neighbors to discuss all or nothing. Don’t be afraid, they won’t eat you. » Communicative giggles in cars.
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Unlike his fellow surfer Brice from Nice, Eric did not wait for the second wave to develop his number “which aims to raise awareness”. In fact, in May 2020, the SNCF, marked by the strike movement against the pension reform and the first deconfinement linked to the Covid-19 epidemic, asked TGV drivers to say “hello”. A practice directly inspired by announcements by airline pilots “to make it a little more luxurious”formulates our speaker who does not deny his polar.
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