Are Dubai's Businesses Ignoring the Salik Toll?

Most businesses I have spoken to about it haven’t got around to thinking about their policy regarding the Salik congestion charge yet. Which is possibly slightly strange.

Does your company intend to pay the Salik costs of business travel? Will you get an allowance? Or is the company simply ignoring the additional charges and expecting you to pay them out of your pocket?

If companies intend to pay it, it’s possible to envisage the charge contributing an additional cost to service businesses of anything up to 1%. In other words, Salik is a significant potential addition to the cost at the bottom line – and an inflationary contributor.

The costs soon mount up, by the way. And if, as I suspect, we will be seeing a lot more Salik Tollgates springing up, we’ll be looking at the potential for Dubai's busy business types to relatively easily rack up the full daily Dhs 24 per day charge (6 passes) with ease. At Dhs 24 for 5 working days and 11 months (say you spend your four week leave out of the country), that’s a cool annual Dhs 5,280 ($1,444).

So what is the policy? Pay reasonable business travel, pay an allowance to offset the effect on staff pockets or let them pay it themselves? Companies will undoubtedly find staff asking about it over the coming week.

Look on the bright side. One point of view is that it should at least cut down on the useless and frustratingly unnecessary meetings we all suffer from. :)

Salik Goes Ahead. Of Course.

The near-hysterical tone of the chatter surrounding Dubai's controversial Salik (Arabic for 'clear') congestion charge has been cranked up by a report from Zawya Dow Jones that the introduction of the toll may be delayed. The original Zawya story, that the RTA was meeting Sunday to discuss possibly delaying the scheme in the face of public reaction, was denied by the RTA and the denial story is front page 7Days, Gulf News and Gulf Today. Khaleej Times and the Arabics didn't go as big with it.

Zawya's sticking with the story it had, updated here, but is saying that the meeting was duly held and RTA decided to go ahead with the scheme. None of the stories add much information, of course.

We are terribly prone to this type of hysteria here in Lalaland. A few years ago a Shopping Festival stunt to bake the world's biggest cake (it stretched up Maktoum Street and down Muraqqabat or something like that, if my ageing memory serves me right) came to a messy end after a rumour went around that there were keys to a Toyota Lexus hidden in the cake: 'members of the public' lost no time in attacking the enormous sugary confection in search of a bonanza that was, sadly, not there.

Now we're getting hysterical at any opportunity to believe that we won't have to pay Dhs 100 for the damn tag and another Dhs4 every time we pass a toll gate. The level of speculation and gossip that's out there, of course, being the direct result of a flawed and unclear communications strategy. The great lesson here: news expands to fill a vacuum.

But what larks, Pip!

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.

Cross Cultural Exchange She Too Much For Good

Having just spent a most pleasant and productive three days with our European colleagues at the annual uber-klatch, this year's was in Vienna, I can now say that I have propelled a pedalo across the Danube, which wasn’t honestly in my list of 100 Things to Do Before I Die.

The frank, friendly-natured chat and goodwill of something like 150 smart people is a wonderful thing, although the rapid expansion of the companies in the network has meant many new faces and the necessity of going through the same explanations and conversations time and again: no, I’m not a ‘Dubaian’ (What is a Dubaian? As I explained once in the long-missed Campaign Middle East, it’s an alien from the planet Dubya), I’ve lived there for 15 years and I’m white because the sun’s too intense to go out burning yourself every week unless you want early ‘rhino skin’. No, it's not all Palm Islands and ski slopes; well, OK, it's mostly Palm Islands and ski slopes. And so on. So many similar questions and answers! Two of the home team were with me and they, at times, had it harder. No, they’re not forced to wear a chador or ‘full hejab’ at home was one response, politely enough delivered but through gritted teeth.

The curiosity and desire to hear more about the region, us and our lives is genuine. They’re smart people, our European colleagues, and the chance to get together, to clear things like that up and high-spot our market is always one that’s gleefully taken on my part. The fact that so many misconceptions still exist is an opportunity to put things right rather than an annoyance to rail at. New friends and contacts made, many things cleared up and new opportunities to explore. Truly a good investment and much fun.

But I was truly delighted and touched when one Bright Young Thing, hearing I was there from the Dubai office and representing the Middle East, congratulated me on the standard of my English.

Chador indeed…

Vienna, Vienna

Q: How do you know when the maid who cleans your hotel room is unhappy with her employer?
A: When the shower is set to cold and the shower head twisted round so that it hits you in the face every time you turn it on.

It must be a bitch working for the Hilton and knowing that you're funding that silly girl's OTT lifestyle. I sympathise. But I keep forgetting to redirect the shower in the morning and I'm getting caught every time. Paranoia? No. The shower head's natural inclination is to twist left towards the wall. This is sabotage and I keep getting sabotted.

*sigh*

Proof of Concept Silliness

So this is a horrible picture of 'Geek in chief' Gianni Catalfamo (of course only horrible pictures can be taken of Gianni) from the Pleon klatch in rainy Vienna just to show you can post piccies to your blog using the superior and sleek Nokia N93 Music Edition.

Ha, Catalfamo!

Salik. Who’s Buying the Taxi’s Tags, Then?

Mr. Ghulam the taxi driver is not at all happy about the Salik congestion charge (although, if we’re to believe Gulf News, neither’s anyone else except ‘traffic expert’ Mattar Al Tayer). Apart from anything else, he wants to know who’s going to pay the Dhs100 upfront cost of the Salik RFID tag itself. As a taxi driver, he’s pretty sure his Sharjah company isn’t going to spring for it. Although the TRA has been clear that passengers should pay the Dhs4 ($1) for the toll itself if they insist on passing a toll gate, nobody’s said who should pay for the tag itself. And Dhs100 is a lot of money to a taxi driver here in the city of dreams.

Meanwhile, signs for Salik gates are springing up on access roads to Dubai – spotted so far in Qusais and the Sheikh Zayed Road by Jebel Ali. Does that mean more Salik gates are on the way? Fans of early announcements remember promises of gates on every access road to Dubai and a figure of 70 gates was being bandied about at one stage.

Watch those spaces!!!

QE2 Du-Bought! All Your Boat Are Belong to Us!

We got the Guggenheim and the Louvre. We're building our own Eiffel Tower and Pyramids. Now we got the QE2!

No icon is safe! Haha! All your base are belong to us!

Face it: if you're going to buy a boat, you might as well buy a really, really big boat. Refurbished in 2000 at a total cost to Cunard of something like $40 million, following a $25mn refit in 1996 and a $60mn refit in 1994, (all calculated, incidentally, at today's $/£ rates) the ship then sells for less than it's cost Cunard in refits over the past 15 years.

A canny bargain for Dubai!

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?

Public Relations Quote of the Year

My personal favourite public relations quote of the year so far comes from Andrew Lee Butters, posting a story on the Kurdish PKK on the most excellent Time Middle East blog:

"If radical guerillas stuck in the mountains had good media advisors, perhaps they wouldn't be be radical guerillas stuck in the mountains."

It's so good that I'm going to have it made into a T-shirt.