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French and German public employment offices are open and accessible public institutions. Ethnographical analysis allows observing several “impromptu uses”, without any institutional anchoring. Some people seek help from caseworkers, essentially to find their way around or to translate documents. Other people try to benefit from discrete activities at a distance from the desk. This article shows the uneven distribution of these practices between German and French public employment services, depending on the conditions of reception and treatment of individuals. It therefore questions the capacity of public employment services to steer their activity on the basis of satisfaction surveys, which can only neglect a significant volume of social uses resulting from secondary adaptations of the public that frequents the institution.