The ENOC Case Study Continues

Image via WikipediaSorry, but I started following this story and I can't seem to tear my eyes away from the wreckage even as I try. Today's newspapers report Dubai based petroleum company ENOC's denial of yesterday's Gulf News story.

Yes, that's right. ENOC Group suddenly had something to say after something like a month of obdurate silence.

Top honours to The National once more, which carries a better researched and more rounded story, taking the opportunity to recap the whole episode and referring to ENOC, with perhaps a grim smile as it rewards weeks of treating the press as if they don't exist or matter, as a 'troubled company'. Khaleej Times couldn't bring itself to name its long-term rival and refers to 'reports in a section of the English media'. Gulf News itself wasn't for stepping down, running ENOC's denial but affirming its report that 'sources in the oil industry confirmed the possibility that other retailers have shown interest in assuming responsibility for those [ENOC's] operations'

Breaking its long silence has certainly brought ENOC to the fore again and will once again step up the pressure from media and the public for some form of clarity. Sadly, there hasn't been a lot of that around but ENOC's statement to the media yesterday does rather protest too much when it accuses Gulf News of baseless speculation.

Here are five rules of Public Relations that may help:

Rule One
News expands to fill a vacuum
This is a Great Truth of Public Relations. If you do not speak clearly and with purpose, you leave room for speculation. The media, like the people it represents, will speculate. Experts, pundits, the public will all speculate. Many will happily speculate for the media to use in its own speculative stories. If you decide to issue 'no comment' or, worse, not to pick up the phone, you have invited speculation round to yours for dinner and have no right to complain when your paintwork gets scratched and your carpet ruined.

Rule Two
Responding to speculation legitimises it
If you respond to one speculative report, you respond to all of them. Many major corporates have a policy of not responding to rumour or speculation, precisely because you really don't want to start affirming or denying purely speculative plays. It's actually a journalistic technique, to speculatively assert something to see if you get a 'bite'. By all means respond to legitimate public concern and hard facts presented to you. But don't fail to respond to those and reserve your powder just to waste it on speculation.

Rule Three
Don't pretend to play hardball
ENOC's statement asks for an apology from Gulf News. This was, in my professional opinion, a basic error (one of very many). Gulf News hasn't apologised and has stood by its story. So where are you going to go now, big shot? If you just let that go now, you just affirmed the story, which only ever discussed a possibility in its original form. Discussing a possibility is, of course, pure speculation. Better not to have gone there in the first place, IMHO...

Rule Four
Tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth
Interestingly, ENOC's statement only comments on one aspect of Gulf News' story, the possibility that ADNOC will be given the running of ENOC stations in Sharjah and the northern emirates. It doesn't comment on part of the story that discussed ENOC requesting a lifting of the price cap or the strong rejection of proposed solutions by government officials. It only talks to one fact in the whole story, but has now established the principle that ENOC will comment to correct facts presented by media. It's not a rounded statement, where one was most certainly called for.

Rule Five
Have a communications strategy
Have an agreed strategy in place, don't just go knee-jerking all over the shop. The National today gleefully trots out the original statement made to media by ENOC, that the affected stations were subject to 'technical upgrades' and the subsequent lack of any evidence to that effect. Having made a statement that few, if any, believed and then followed that up by totally ignoring the media, the company has now arguably lost public trust. As one commentator in today's National story has it:

“I doubt they want to hang onto the whole network, otherwise they would have supplied them. We’ve gone beyond that point now. It’s all speculation of course, but Enoc may just be trying to get a better price for them.”

That's pretty cynical, no? But it's hard to see what the company's management of the media and public transparency aspects of this story has done to mitigate such cynicism from the public, pundits and media.

Dehumanising or Brilliant Advertising?

Image via WikipediaThere's an interesting image in today's soaraway Gulf News that isn't posted up on its website (well, I couldn't find it anyway). It's on page 36 at the bottom and it's captioned 'Moving Boards'. Under the headline is a night-time picture of four unhappy-looking people walking past a busy street café with big, flat digital advertising boards strapped to their backs. The first in line certainly looks as if the thing is weighing him down - his half-lidded eyes and listless demeanour don't speak of a man having fun. But then how many of us think our idea of fun is being made to parade around the streets with large digital advertising screens strapped to our backs?

I first saw this idea applied in Jordan a couple of years back and was appalled by it then. I though the sandwich board man was an image of recession, or a nutter proclaiming the end of the world is nigh. But to find people being used like this to tout advertising messages simply strikes me as abusive.

According to Gulf News' well thought-out caption, "The moving boards with its (sic) mobility, visibility  and human interaction has big potential to increase public awareness." What? Human interaction? Where's the interaction between the disinterested diners and the four shambling men being made to parade Etisalat's advertising messages around on their backs all night? They're not interacting, they're merely beasts of digital burden.

Or am I being a silly, mealy-mouthed, do-gooding, pinko commie liberal?

When Stickers Turn Evil

Image via Wikipedia

Gulf News has fallen into the very annoying habit indeed of selling advertisers the right to post a removable sticker on the front page. It’s come a cropper with this in the past, one sticker which wasn’t very removable damaged the paper when readers attempted to see the news they are paying for, while another was a ‘feel good’ message splatted on news of a devastating human tragedy.

It’s interesting to see how much a brand will damage itself for short term gain. Readers, who let us not forget actually pay for Gulf News and so have some expectation of getting access to news, are forced to remove the sticker before they can read the front page of the newspaper – the most important page of news that GN has to offer.

It is arguably no great deal, this process of getting your fingernail under the corner of a little advert and removing it before you can read the story under the front page headline. But it’s actually just as annoying as Etisalat’s habit of selling its customers to SMS spammers – I don’t want it, I didn’t ask for it, it forces me to act to remove it before I can access a product/service I have paid to receive. This means that the sticker connotes the brand it is promoting with irritation as well as devaluing the brand of the product used to carry the message.

It does seem odd to me that advertising agencies still fail to understand that consumers don’t actually want invasive advertising in their lives. Agencies slap themselves on the back about how their campaign was ‘edgy’ and ‘disruptive’ and appear to completely miss the point that I, and many others like me, do not want my life disrupted by a brand screaming slogans in my face. I don't want to have to remove stickers or open spammy text messages from companies. I am increasingly sensitive to it, increasingly irritated by it and increasingly likely to act against it by sharing my irritation with an increasingly large audience of people who are voting with their feet and sharing their feelings about brands and media that act in this way.

While I’m being bad tempered about this stupid idea, a message for Carrefour’s advertising agency regarding the sticker I had to unpeel from today's GN: the washing liquid brand Pril is spelled with one ‘l’ as shown clearly in the image of the product on the sticker. You dolts have spelled it with two ‘l’s in the text outlining the marvellous special offer I can ‘avail’ with your ‘voucher’.

Green and Greener

Image by Sky Competition via Flickr

I know I'm a bit hard on Gulf News occasionally and it does, believe me, make me feel guilty. But sometimes the chaps over at the Newspaper That Tells It Like It Is do stuff that has me shaking my head in incredulous disbelief.

Today's 450g slab of papery joy contains a shiny supplement titled 'Go Green'. It's one of those special supplements so beloved of newspapers here - the ones where you get a page of the uncritical, slavish blether of your choice printed about you as long as you advertise. The ones nobody in their right minds reads. Ever.

In fact, 54 pages (including covers) of shiny, high-ceramic glossy paper are dedicated to the green message - and, of course, not even a nod to the concept of carbon neutrality or perhaps the advantages of not wasting something like 11 tonnes of paper (if my calculations are correct, 100g per supplement, 112,000 claimed run by GN) to produce something that is purely a vehicle for printing advertising for profit. Its informational value or the fact that it is in fact a genuine attempt to educate and inspire people is something I would love to see someone try and defend.

This next bit isn't going to make me popular among a number of people, including those I count as friends.

The same issue of GN (which, incidentally, also covers the IRENA summit in Abu Dhabi) also illustrates its tabloid section with the headline 'Green Day' and a cover image of a Toyota FJ Cruiser churning up the green desert like a little blue plough, following in the tracks of many others that have destroyed the delicate plant life on the side of the dune. This car would have been one of the thousand or so cars that annually plough a great scar of tracks through the desert in the name of the Gulf News Fun Run.

The desert here is a delicate biome and never more so than when it greens after rain. To show it being destroyed by hundreds of cars, the carpet of tentative life torn up and mashed into a muddy gash next to the words, 'Participants... enjoyed the unique sight of the desert in bloom.' shows a most definite lack of understanding of the word irony.

Now I have to admit I'm deeply conflicted here. A long term resident, I often drive in the desert and have done so for many years in parties of varying sizes.

I have always had a mild aversion to the idea of a thousand cars churning up the desert, believing (probably wrongly) that smaller parties of drivers would have a lesser impact than hundreds at a time. At the same time, the Fun Run is a much-loved annual event that brings a large number of people together in their enjoyment of the outdoors - and I have to record that the marshals do ensure that litter and the like are not left behind.

But today's Gulf News gleefully slaps the word GREEN on two activities that are most definitely negative in their impact on our environment. I guess it's one thing to proselytise in naggy 'go green' editorial campaigns, but quite another to truly practice what you preach.

Gulf News' Greenwash

Image via Wikipedia

Today's Gulf News, weighing in at a record low 400g incidentally, carries remarkable exercise in hypocrisy.

The newspaper's front page is a clarion call and exhortation to us all to save our planet. This comes from a consortium of 56 newspapers in 45 countries, all of whom have made the same mistake of assuming that we are paying them to nag us rather than provide us with the news, analysis and context that we are told we can expect from our newspapers.

Rather than run this extraordinary editorial on a wrap-around (for instance, seeking sponsorship to offset the additional cost), Gulf News has instead decided to sacrifice the front page entirely, leaving us with today's lead story being the page 3 report on the UAE's prevalence of childhood tooth decay.

Perhaps I am being far too critical and grumpy, but the exhortation to save the planet sat oddly with me, coming as it does from a medium comprised of dead trees. In fact, even today's slimmed down Gulf News consumed something like 46,000 kilos of paper if we are to apply the paper's 2008 BPA audited circulation of 115,000 copies. That's knocking on 17 thousand tonnes of paper per year - and at GN's 2008 weight of 1.2 kilos, we'd have been looking at a whopping 50 tonnes of paper, not including all those fascinating supplements on air conditioning, Malta and Peridontal Marmoset Splicing that brighten up GN's readers' lives.

If all of the newspapers in the global 'we're running an editorial that calls on our leaders to be more green' group have the same pagination and run as GN (and many, incidentally, have a significantly higher pagination and run), their daily collective impact on the planet is the consumption of over two million kilos of paper - a commodity that is made out of dead trees.

If Gulf News had offset its carbon, I'd be more willing to bear with the self-righteous finger-wagging. If it had made any contribution whatsoever to research or 'green' charities , I'd be inclined to admiration (and no, I don't consider a one-off stunt of circulating printed jute bags to subscribers as being significant or even terribly helpful). If it had made a commitment to recycled paper, soy-based inks or other 'green' technologies, I'd be more willing to listen - although I have to note the editorial actually contains very little original or even interesting content that advances the debate it professes to contribute to.

But no, none of the above apply. Gulf News has instead contented itself with taking away a lump of the news that I have paid for and substituting it with a rambling piece of poorly hashed together pompousness that truly beggars belief.

Printed. On. Dead. Trees.

Slim

Image via Wikipedia

As various posts over the past eight or so months have noted, Gulf News has been cutting back on the carbs and has dropped its weight from a rather turgid 1.3Kg in November 2008 to an average 640g in Feb 2009, a downward trend continued through May, which saw the paper taking up regular exercise and slimming down to an reasonably regular 540g.

It's been feeling lighter recently and I have generally resisted the mildly obsessive impulse to weigh it again, but today's edition felt noticeably more feather-like. And it is - thanks to my trusty weighing scale (the best Dhs19 I've spent at Lal's in a long time) I can report that today's GN is weighing in at 440g, something like a third of its original weight. I have to add the usual caveat - a Dhs19 scale is hardly capable of atomic accuracy.

I think we can all agree there's a trend here - it's hardly rocket science. The fact that the trend is continuing is a worry, though. GN has already apparently shed a number of journalistic jobs - albeit fudging this news with an example of corporate responsibility and transparency that should inform any company wishing to call the skeleton in the cupboard a 'new market opportunity'. Few will welcome the news of more to come.

Alstom and the Saudi Rail Project Story

Image by michallon via Flickr

Gulf News' remarkable cover story today is that French rail company Alstom is coming under pressure from a range of advocacy groups lobbying Saudi authorities to withdraw from their award of the Makkah to Madinah railway project to the company. Those groups, including the PLO and the PA, are angered that Alstom is building a light rail network in occupied Jerusalem.

The page one lead story for some reason completely fails to mention that Alstom holds the contract for Dubai's Al Sufouh tramline. The contract, awarded by the RTA to the ABS consortium, is worth over $500 million, with Alstom claiming some $280 million of that value in the partnership with felow consortium members Besix and Serco (who, respectively, put the BS into ABS). In fact, it's one of a number of significant contracts that Alstom has won in Dubai and the Middle East region as a whole - Alstom is a major player in power generation, too.

The Dubai contract for the Citadis railway system is actually significant as it will trial a new air-conditioning system on platforms for the first time. Citadis has been installed in over 28 cities around the world, according to the company.

Gulf News merely mentions that the company is 'eyeing' business in Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. And yet the Alstom contract award, made in April 2008, is the first result you get by googling 'Alstom transport Dubai'.

How strange, is it not, that Gulf News' journalists missed that fact when researching such an important story?

(By the way, Alstom itself makes no secret of its work in Israel - in presentations such as this one, the company cites its work in Jerusalem as a case study. Like many other corporate companies around the world, Alstom works globally including projects in the Arab World and Israel. We do all know that hundreds, if not thousands, of corporates do this, don't we?)

Recession? What recession?

Image via Wikipedia

Gulf News is weighing in at something like (don't forget I'm using a Dhs19 scales from Lal's, so I can't really do the old atomic level measurements here) 540g these days, down from 1.3 Kg in November 2008 - and also down from the 640g-odd that it had sort of settled down to in February.

It peaks and troughs a bit, but it's been steadily trending down - the majority of the loss has, of course, been in the enormous volumes of clamorous and directive real estate advertising that last year was telling us to 'Live your dreams' and 'Dare to drivel' and whatnot.

At the same time, Al Nisr Publishing's Property Weekly (Al Nisr is GN's parent company) has dropped again from 72 pages to 66 - from a high of over 144 pages last year.

I take no pleasure in recording this. I have pals at Gulf News & PW and the newspaper has been my constant companion in over 15 years' living in the UAE. I'm rather fond of it, in a strange way.

But it's interesting, perhaps, for those who thought the worst was over in Jan/Feb and that we'd bottomed with the great Q1 shock, to see that the market's still losing value and that real estate advertising (and, arguably, advertising across the board) continues to shrink.

Disclaimer. This article is in no way intended to damage the economy or indeed to provoke any other economic affect beyond a mild look of passing interest between dunking the first and second Rich Tea biscuit in one's morning tea. No acarpi were harmed in the production of this post.

Lightweight

Image via Wikipedia

Look, I'm really sorry. Gulf News has been a constant companion to me for the past fifteen years and I regard this most hallowed of newspapers with great affection. The recent spate of GN-unfriendly blog posts is purely coincidence and certainly doesn't signal an outbreak of anti-GN sentiment.

But I picked up today's issue and it felt so light that I had to go back to my newspaper weighing habits. It weighed in at 470g, a new low for the newspaper that tipped the scales at a whopping 1.3 kilos last November, pre-crunch.

I stopped weighing it last week after it had settled down to a steady 670g on most days.

Drub That Sub!

Gulf News' sub-editors are having a bad week. After yesterday's awful front page headline, today they've managed a nice, 48 point bold literal.

Dr. Shaikh Sultan Al Qassimi Sultan gets Hamdam award for academic excellence

No he doesn't. He gets Hamdan award, named for HH Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum.

It's online, too. Here.

Oddly enough, I sympathise. I once caused the word Midddle East to be typeset in 96 point text across a double page spread in a book I published in a former life. It took a year before anyone noticed.

I have always blamed a variant on Douglas Adams' SEP Field. The SEP or Somebody Else's Problem Field is an invisibility cloak that uses incongruity, for instance a spaceship that looks like an Italian bistro. The disconnect is so overwhelming that it causes brain skitter and is ignored as somebody else's problem, so rendering the cloaked object invisible.

The same is true of literals. Especially in headlines.

(Wow. I'm not going to be GN's 'weekly blog pick' this week, am I?)

Gulf News Stumped

Who took the decision at Gulf News to run today's front page headline?

'Lahore attack stumps world' must rank as one of the worst headlines I have ever seen.

Surely even the most feckless intern would balk at cracking a cheap gag at the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan yesterday? It's not even a great gag. It's a crap gag, playing on 'stumps' as in cricket stumps and 'stumps' as in Billy stumped me with his question

I'd rather have seen 'stuns' - not perhaps the most original headline in the world, but certainly one that would have accurately reflected public sentiment - but GN's sub preferred to be clever-clever. And crass.

It's not as if the story then goes on to show how the world was 'stumped' by the attack. The story clearly shows the world has immediately and strongly condemned the attack.

Decorated with a bloody picture of a dead commando, one of the seven Pakistani commandoes who died protecting the Sri Lankan team, the weak joke is an unjustifiable lapse in taste and common sense. On the front page of a national daily newspaper.

What were they thinking?

(Postscript: Have removed the original link to the headline as they link to the current day's front page rather than preserving the link to the day you originally linked to. Cheers Gianni!)

Weird Fish

The mysterious fishy catch that has been puzzling fishermen in Ras Al Khaimah since Sunday has not only been identified as an Ocean Sunfish but has also been cited by today's Gulf News (640g) as probably one of the most dense materials known to man.

Today's GN report describes the fish as being the size of a dinner plate and yet weighing in at half a tonne. Adult males can reach weights of a whole metric tonne, apparently.

Deliciously, the online version of the story also maintains the fish to be the size of a dinner plate.

Let's see how long that lasts...

UPDATE

Goofed. As Nick points out in the comments, the article reads dinner plate SHAPED not SIZED and so that means I screwed up in a big way... It's just a stupid Sunfish and is not in fact one of the densest materials known to man, or a SNAFU by GN and so the egg has quite proverbially hit the fan and is now heading my way at a speed of knots.

Poste in haste, regret at leisure...

Advertisement

Gulf News (640g) is more than worth your Dhs3 today, recessionary pressures notwithstanding.

It will repay your investment not because it contains much newsy stuff printed on dead trees, and certainly not for its coverage of the UAE Journalists' Association conference, but because of the advertisement on page 36. This alone justifies the expenditure, this alone makes today's GN a collector's item.

I commend it to you most highly.

Update. For those readers unable or unwilling (Nick) to purchase Gulf News, I have now uploaded a scan. GN's subscription department will never forgive me... You'll have to click on it to read it, of course...

Phew!

Gulf News back up to a healthy 1.2kg this morning.

So there isn't a recession after all!

Weighty

I have often referred to that most marvellous of newspapers, the leviathan Gulf News, as a 'weighty tome' or a 'multi-kilo wodge'.

It looks like that's changed. Today's GN was so light in the hand that I thought it had been home baked by the legendary Mrs Gleeson of Ballybrista.*

Being a little bit of a picky bear, I thought I'd take a look at a few past copies and see what's been going on around here. And so with the help of a micron-accurate scientific weighing instrument (a Dhs19 scale from Lal's) I was able to track back a handful of copies from the last couple of weeks. And this is what I found:

26/11 1300g
30/11 1200g
1/12 1000g
3/12 800g
11/12 690g

I draw no conclusions here. I merely present the statistics.


*Mrs Gleeson lives around the corner from Sarah's homeplace in Tipperary and cooks cakes and pastries so light that they float away. She does this using a massive iron Aga kitchen range that looks like you'd only really be able to roast whole cows in it, but somehow she conjures up amazing things from the monster.

Etisalat Customers Happy. Du Faces Task. Maktoob Effs Up.

Maktoob Research, the research arm of Arabic portal Maktoob.com, has published a report citing that 74% of Etisalat customers are happy campers.

They didn’t use the phrase ‘happy campers’, obviously!

The 74%, drawn from a sample of 360 customers (A nice round number! Arf! Arf!), are either ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ with the mobile operator’s services. Gulf News took the opportunity in its story earlier today to point out that Du faces an ‘uphill task’ in converting these happy souls to its cause.

Uphill task. Right.

It's a great story. Media in the Middle East loves research: figures go down really well. But what amazes me is that Maktoob itself didn't make any reference to the story on its homepage on the day its release was due to get coverage - today. So any curious souls (like me) that went there to find out more didn't have a reference point to the story. Worse, when you finally find the Maktoob Research section of the site (still no reference to the cellular report) and look up its press section, the release isn't posted there!

In all fairness, I saved the original post this morning and gave 'em all day to catch up. It's 9pm DXB time and nothing's changed. The media's talking about Maktoob's cellular research, but Maktoob's not. Own goal.

Integrated campaign. So easy to say, so hard to do...

Russian Girl's Dubai Face Slash Attack

You'd have thought that, coming back to Lalaland from Europe, you'd have the right to expect the usual slew of daft 'good times' news from the dailies but I was shocked to catch Gulf News' story on Alla Khrapovitskaya, the 20 year old student who was attacked in Dhiyafa, near to where our bijou offices are.

Returning home from university one evening late in May, she was slashed repeatedly in the face by an unknown attacker using 'a large knife'. She remembers little about the incident, says GN, bar that it was unprovoked and her assailant took nothing from her and didn't try to touch her sexually.

The slash across her face cuts through her left cheek and then, the other side of her mouth, her right cheek. Another cuts down across her mouth from her left cheek while the right side of her face bears a downward slash from her eyebrow to her lower cheek. In all, she has seven such slashes carved into her face. The scarring she has been left with is horrific.

Her mother wants her to have reconstructive surgery: she told GN she was willing to sell her kidney to pay to restore her daughter's face. I did find it strange that someone would immediately think of that as a way to raise money.

But two things really struck me hard about this story. The first was that I cannot recall any previous story - did it really take a month to get this out there? And the second thing was that the GN report doesn't address the one angle that is surely of the greatest public concern. Despite a natural sympathy for the poor girl, it's the fact that the police are at a total loss: the attacker left 'no clues' apparently.

Which means that whoever did this is still free and wandering around Dubai's lively Satwa residential area at night. The thought is unsettling, to say the least.

One Black Acer Promotional Stone

Remember One Red Paperclip? The kid (Kyle MacDonald) that bartered a paperclip in a series of increasingly unlikely and jaw-dropping swaps that saw him eventually get a house in Kipling, Saskatchewan out of it all? Put aside, for a second, the question of whether you'd want to live in Kipling Sakatchewan. Because I’ve had an idea.

It started with the Acer Pointless Promotional Stone, pictured above in loving TechniColour. You see, it was sitting there on my desk after I wrote the grumpy post about the (s) ad campaign that was supposed to promote the Acer Gemstone laptop. I tried giving it away, but colleagues wouldn’t take it – they kept giving it back. One pointed out, quite correctly, that the stone in question had a flaw in it (true) and that it wasn’t a gemstone anyway so what on earth did it have to do with a computer called Gemstone?

Which, I have say, I could only agree with.

So the thing remains sat there on my desk, an object so utterly useless that I can’t even give it away. Which spawned the idea of going one step further than ‘one red paperclip’. I am going to set out to swap my totally useless and fundamentally undesirable stone (an object even less valuable, anyone reasonable would agree, than a paperclip), with the ultimate objective of owning the moon.

I know it might seem like a big leap, but if you think of it more as just a giant step it doesn’t look so daunting. Just to make it more attractive, I am prepared to offer the stone along with the promotional text that accompanied it at no extra charge.

Anyone want to make the first offer?

Dubai Summer Surprises - Lift Surprises

I am daily reminded of the joys of unfettered multiculturalism. I’m not sure if there are many places on earth that are quite so polyglot as Dubai, the city that, more than any other, sits on the cultural tectonic between East and West. It is here that cheap sub-continental and Asian labour rubs shoulders with Western White Collars, where retail staff earning $200 a month serve shoppers earning $200,000 a year and more and where Indian labourers working for Irish contractors build Australian designed towers for Arab companies to sell to Indian investors.

And, let us forget the important stuff that is the lifeblood of this odd multinational mixture, we’re all of us better off for being here. Tens of nationalities co-exist here, at times uncomfortably but at least in broad consensus. The oddities and differences, however, can provide fascinating anthropological material.

Take lifts. In this part of the world, lifts often have mirrored back panels. This can provide much amusement for the amusedly inclined.

If you are ever moved to touch a Balinese person on the head, restrain yourself. It’s the worst insult and you’ll end up, if you’re lucky, with a black eye. If you’re Dutch, you’ll likely end up with a rice sickle buried in your chest. A strong veneration for the head appears to be core to Bali’s animistic Hinduism, as well as forming something of a preoccupation for Hindus in general.

So, when in Dubai, do expect Indian chaps entering a lift to notice the mirror, admire themselves fleetingly and then whip out a comb and start to re-shape the super-cranial keratin (hair). Perhaps amusingly, this ritual grooming invariably takes precedence over selecting a destination floor, leaving one’s fleeting travelling companion impeccably groomed but unfloored.

For some reason, many people from the East see the process of calling a lift differently from Europeans. In Europe, and many parts of East Asia, one presses the ‘up’ button if one wishes to go up and the ‘down’ button if one wishes to go down. In Asia, particularly India, it seems that one presses the ‘up’ button to summon a lift up and the ‘down’ button to summon a lift down.

So, if on the ground floor of a 10 story building, many people in Dubai press the down button to call the lift down to them. If you’re on the 8^th story of a 10 story building and aiming to go down, the best thing to do is call the ‘up’ button on the grounds that the lifts are more likely to be below you than above. Often people press both ‘up’ and ‘down’ buttons as this increases the statistical likelihood of the lift coming more quickly. Because this is at odds with the way lifts are programmed, this results in many people being transported in the contrary vertical direction to that desired.

All of which explains why, occasionally, I call the lift from our basement carparking to find it already filled with people grinning out at me as I gape at them. Then the doors close again and they are taken away from me. Which, as summer has arrived and the humidity has rendered the air moist, thick and soupy (I swear I saw a wadi fish swimming past my head the other day), is lucky because people can become subject to violent irritability in these conditions.

Incidentally, I declare Summer upon us with some trepidation as Gulf News has not marked its official advent with a picture of a pigeon drinking from a standpipe or labourers resting in the shade. But I do feel I'm on the right lines and offical confirmation should come soon...

Salik Triggers Toll Gate Tetris

I'm sorry. I couldn't help it. Apologies to Gulf News, whose photo triggered this unworthy Friday thought. :)