The displays on the bikes were sometimes very faint, and I didn’t actually know what I was supposed to see anyway. Not an hourglass apparently. An extremely nice bilingual girl at the bike stand, who was having problems of her own with a bike, helped me get an English speaking person on the the Velib number, and we got it straightened out. But it took quite a while and spoiled that ride. By the way, the people in France were almost universally very nice, something I have observed before - just be sure to say “Bonjour” first! :-)