Salik Surprises

So much has been written about Dubai’s congestion charge, Salik, that it’s difficult to contemplate adding to what’s already out there without a certain sense of resignation and perhaps a touch of fear that it’s just going to be a repetition of the considerable volume of incredulity, indignation, anger and exasperated invective that has peppered so many blogs over the past couple of months. Even the media, ever-aware of the burden of governmental disapproval, has tried to reflect the broad public dislike of the scheme. Strangely, few of the people who have complained appear to have been motivated to do so by the financial impact: it has been the apparent lack of a clear objective or a well-communicated plan of any sort that has drawn much of the negative comment in both on and off-line media. The response of the RTA, to the broad public concern has, at its least helpful, been to tell the public to stow it because they’re ‘not traffic experts’. The flow of information regarding the scheme and the ‘traffic management objectives’ that we’re told about as we hold for the Salik call centre to finish ‘helping’ other callers has hardly ever been more than a grudging trickle.

I am one of those people whose mobile numbers were ‘given wrongly’: I still have the copy of the form in which my mobile number is given with perfect clarity. I corrected the error over the ‘phone last week when I got through to their call centre. Today I got an SMS telling me that my balance of Dhs 2 was insufficient and that I should top up or face a fine. Now, forgive me, but I thought that one of the ideas was that you’d get an SMS warning you that your balance was low. Apparently not.

So I went to top up. I have to confess I was a little annoyed at having to do this on the spur of the moment rather than with a couple of crossings’ notice, but never mind. The Emarat station just prior to the Garhoud toll only has one till that can take Salik top-ups because they only have one pad of Salik top up forms – a rather analogue, multipart book of slips.

I can pay my phone bill using online and telephone banking, as well as my electricity and water bill. I can pay my traffic fines and I can even renew my PO box online.

But I have to top up my Salik account by filling in a cloakroom slip? So be it. I aimed to top up with a nice Dhs250 so that I wouldn't have to do it again for a good while. So I gave the girl my Visa card. Which is when I discovered you can only pay for Salik by cash.

What a muckle-headed slice of totally incompetent daftness.

But I’m not finished by a long chalk. You see, I then drove over Garhoud to hit the tailback immediately after the bridge. Because it’s gridlocked over Maktoum and the new Floating Bridge through City Centre and up the Ittihad Road to Sharjah. Because the traffic that’s crossed Business Bay to avoid Salik joins Garhoud a couple of hundred meters after the very bridge that this Salik scheme was meant to keep clear. It’s caused worse traffic congestion in the whole Deira area than we have every seen before and THIS IS SUMMER TRAFFIC – the number of cars on the road is something like 25% less than normal.

I thought I’d get a few laughs out of Salik but I, along with a lot of other people, have stopped laughing. Come September, when the traffic levels ramp back up to their usual heaving stock car race levels, there’ll be a whole lot more people not laughing.

Someone should really start doing some explaining.

Sky - That's Better!

Sky was getting properly into the swing of things last night: lots of stories on how communities were coming together and managing to cope with the flooding disaster.

I can only hope that my profound indignation, in the spirit of a butterfly in Beijing, somehow transmitted itself to London and changed a few synapses in the mind of a senior production team member. But sadly I have to admit that it's more likely that they simply came to their senses...

Shopper's Paradise

Today's Emarat Al Youm has a news story blaring the great news that retail sales in Dubai have gone through the roof this summer, obviously thanks to the Dubai Summer Surprises festival which is headed, as over 900 Facebook Group joining (it's going to hit the 1,000 by the weekend) people know, by the infinite-eyed grinning yellow evil that is Modhesh Al Modhesh.

25% increase in shoppers shrills the page 18 headline, backed up by the picture caption, Boutiques and accessory shops had the highest share of Festival sales.

Delightfully, the huge image used to illustrate the story is that of an completely empty shop.

One can only conjecture that they had been scared away temporarily by the appearance of a hungry, ravening Modhesh...

Ainsworth 1 Sky News 0 - They're Still Getting the Tone Wrong!

Following my wee rant about Sky News and how I think they’re getting the tone of their reporting on the floods in the UK wrong, I was delighted to watch Sky’s Jeremy Thompson interviewing Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment Peter Ainsworth last night. Now please don’t get me wrong, I’m no Tory. But long-time anchor figure Bowen started to rag Ainsworth about David ‘I wash regularly, actually’ Cameron going to Africa while his constituency was underwater. And that brought Ainsworth out of his corner fighting like Tyson on crack cocaine. Ainsworth slammed Thompson for Sky’s ‘blame game’ reporting, pointed out that we all had more important things to worry about and that the community was getting itself together and didn’t need Sky carping and pointing fingers right now thank you very much.

Thompson (whom I respect, incidentally) took a huge whack to the chin. And there I was cheering a spokesperson on again…

Meanwhile, talking about the weather, as the deliciously eccentric Alison Goldfrapp tells us: “It’s a strange day, no colours no shapes”. Today we woke up to the washed out colours of a summer Shamal, everything around rendered indistinct by the whirling sand, the air thick with the fine, pale dust. It gets up your nose, in your ears, in your hair, dries your skin and enervates your spirit.

The Mistral, the Khamsin, the Scirocco – the great seasonal winds of the world. And all we get is the miserable old Shamal.

The UAE’s Shamal whips up the desert and dumps it on the cities: sand streams across the roads and visibility drops, sometimes alarmingly. Shamal is Arabic for North and, perhaps interestingly, many people in the Arab World use shamal to mean left as well as yassar (right is yemin). Quite why North is synonymous with left is a mystery to me...

The beating hot wind, stinging with sand particles, is just what you need to add to that cheery summer feeling. Mind you, it could be worse. We could be 30 feet under in water.

Which is as neat a link as you’re ever going to get on this blog.

What to do?

This most celebrated of UAE ‘Hinglish’ phrases is the ultimate in fatalism. It means, ‘You’re so screwed, you might as well just give up and stop breathing now, pal’, but is infinitely more polite as it also involves a degree of 'And it's not my fault, it's out of my hands and in those of our creator'.

It is invariably delivered with an inclination of the head and a smile. Your electricity has been cut off because of a clerical error, it’s Thursday evening and the reconnection team have all gone home for the weekend and you face at least 72 hours in the sweltering heat with no power and water through no fault of your own. You’re raging and the man from the electricity smiles at you and shakes his head, saying: “What to do?”

Pals Dom and Scott and I thought it would be a great Whisky brand for the Indian market and many a boozy evening has consequently descended into brainstorming sessions for the commercials.

Actor is sitting, cross-legged on the compacted earth, in front of the ruins of a Malabari house. There are coconut palms waving gently in the sun behind him. He’s wearing a shirt and lunghi as he addresses the camera.

“House is burning. Insurance not updated. Wife is leaving. Dowry being refundable. I am having nothing left. Even children are going back to grandmother.”

Actor grins broadly, raising glass of whisky with lots of ice cubes in to camera and inclines head in time-honoured fashion.

“What to do?”

The variations on the theme are, of course, awesome.

It was a phrase I was able to use this morning, as young Carrington was heard fuming and fulminating as he tried to struggle with his new home PC. Apparently he was having some issues with something called Windows Vista that was causing his sparkly new slice of integrated technology platform to blow raspberries, generally misbehave, lock up, whistle Dixie and on the whole refuse to come out and play. I waited until he finished his litany of driver issues and errors and then expressed my sympathy appropriately.

“Yes, I understand the severity of the situation. But what to do?”

I shall not record his response for fear it may offend the delicate ears of the genteel reader…

UK Flooding: The Spokesperson Bites Back

The recent massive flooding in the UK has been interesting for me, particularly because I’ve been able to sit here in the sweltering heat and watch how it’s been handled from a huge distance. And I have to say that the interview I watched recently between Sky News’ anchor and a complete unknown called Graham Bowskill had me cheering.

I spend quite a lot of my professional life coaching spokespeople who will be dealing with media. I spend a little bit of my time being a spokesperson talking to media, too. And so I guess, despite my pro-media approach to my work, I’m also inclined to ‘root’ for a spokesperson. Rarely have I found myself so involved in the moments of combat, because let’s face it this is a contact sport, as I was watching the Bowskill interview.

The story is simple: a huge volume of rain fell on areas in the UK again this week, forcing motorists to spend overnight in their cars on blocked motorways. Roads across the country were flooded and became impassable: whole communities have been flooded out with huge volumes of water - much of it now contaminated.

So when Sky News’ anchor starts to play the blame game and try to pin the misery of overnight stranded motorists and flooded homes on the Highways Agency, you’d expect spokesperson Graham Bowskill to stutter and witter, to try and defend his agency’s pathetic performance to the journalist who speaks for all of us.

Well, he didn’t. He spoke well, cogently and with dignity.

Now UK PR commentator The World’s Leading (Theo to his mates) has already made the point that spokespeople in the UK speak in a strange, strangled, doublespeak when they’re put on the spot. And Graham did that, for sure. But he also pointed out that his agency had issued major warnings to the media (and he didn’t say that the responsibility that the media bore was that of ensuring those warnings were taken as seriously as they were intended, but he might as well have, because the media does bear that responsibility) and that his agency had told people not to travel and his agency was trying to deal with a highly exceptional event. He went on to detail what the issues were and how his agency and its allied emergency services were reacting to meet the challenge – and he was doing that right up until the anchor, who had sensed she wasn’t going to win her moment of fame for nailing the twerp who was responsible for all our misery, cut him off while he was still trying to tell us how the services were dealing with the issue. She was wrong to have done so: and by God, I was (I swear, I was) on the edge of my chair cheering him on. Because a decent man, outlining a decent response - on all our behalves - to a totally unprecedented situation actually deserves our attention and our regard.

The fact is that Bowskill putting his strong case forward well actually played against everything that the journalist wanted – a cheap shot story angle that focused everyone’s rightful indignation and anger on the sucker being interviewed. And so he came through it all beautifully. It’s such a shame that nobody was there to point out how at odds with our common feeling at a time of crisis this style of ‘blame game’ journalism is. Because, of course, the media playing that game would never DREAM of facing public criticism that their response was inappropriate.

Several of Sky's interviews around the whole flooding disaster since have been in the same vein: alarmist and obviously ranging around and looking for someone they can pin blame on. Last night they cut an interview short with a chap who was telling them that the community had actually given up worrying and was taking it all lightly. Again, it's not what they wanted to hear and so they moved on and cut the interview.

And I do find it interesting that, as communities pull together in the face of this unprecedented disaster, Sky is just lobbing stones, being alarmist and generally plain unhelpful. It does seem to me that their tone of coverage is sharply at odds with public sentiment. I wonder if it will backfire on them...

George Bush Colon Cancer Scare: Brilliant!

Do you understand what happened here? They removed polyps from his colon. That means the simian wee bastard had a rectally inserted laproscopy procedure. They gave him 48 hours’ worth of wickedly chemical laxatives that made him shit himself clear (literally), together with a 48 hour ‘no solids’ regime. Over the past two days, he’s eaten nothing but consommé and drunk nothing but water and apple juice. He’s had to take a number of evilly effective chemical laxative doses that had him speeding at absolutely no notice to the bog to void himself in an uncontrollable frenzy of shitting an increasingly watery and uncomfortable stream of warm gleet. And then they slapped a dose of pethedine into his withered veins (Christ, but I bet that reminded him of how a bottle of Jack felt) and slid a KY-smothered fibre optic 'scope into his puckered little Texan ass.

But that’s just the beginning...

Then they pumped air into his colon to inflate it so that the cameras can see around. It’s despicably uncomfortable, like someone released a high pressure airline into your gut. People who’ve done it without the happy juice have been known to scream with the pain of it all.

And then they excised lumps of his lower gut (videotaped – I can’t WAIT for the bootleg) with a hot wire loop so that he could shit it out in a stream of post-operative blood and KY jelly, like a pretty new resident of a Texan jail taking his first crap.

No wonder he handed over to Dick Cheney. Who wants the Free World to be in the hands of a drugged up psychopath who's lost control of his bowels and is taking a royally huge instrument up his ass?

Oh. Hang on. That's pretty much situation normal, isn't it? You'd almost wonder why they bothered calling Dick at all, wouldn't you?

This is something that people in the Arab World should be told about. It will bring them a little moment of joy. Particularly the Iraqis...

The Revenge of the Rose and the Truck Road

One of the many strange and wonderful inventions to come from the mind of Michael Moorcock, one of the great novelists writing in English today, was that of the Gypsy Nation in his fantasy, The Revenge of the Rose. The Gypsy Nation was an enormous caravan of perpetually motive land leviathans that created a world-girdling road of compressed detritus, a huge pathway created from millennia of the caravan's discarded rubbish.

It was the first thing that popped into my head as we travelled down from Dibba to Sharjah: there’s a new road that snakes out through the foothills of the Hajjar mountains behind the Fujairah Cement plant, past the many crushers and quarries that now dot the landscape, and joins the Manama/Ras Al Khaimah road. And its continuation is a truck road, from Manama to just above Umm Al Qawain on the Emirates Road, that runs across the wide, rocky wadi plain and then carries on through the slowly changing landscape until it rises and falls through the red sands of the Northern desert. Dotted along the margins of this lone, straight pencil-line of blacktop is a constant litter of discarded tyres and occasional heaps of rocks that testify to delayed, and dropped, loads. And on the road itself, travelling both ways, is a constant slow-moving procession of heavy vehicles, laden with teetering loads of rock going south and empty (but still lumbering) travelling back north. It’s a nose-to-tail procession that mimics the constant grind of Moorcock’s Gypsy Nation, seemingly unstoppable, slow-moving and perpetual.

This groaning procession is the raw material that’s feeding Dubai’s frenzy of construction: the cement, stone and sand that are being poured together into the dizzying tower blocks and sea-raping palms of Dubai’s Miracle.

Isn’t it strange that they have to level mountains to build skyscrapers and demolish hills to reclaim the sea?

Road Runner and the Radar Rotters

One of the things that’s kept me so long in the UAE is the fact that it’s such a very paradoxical place: there’s never one simple answer or one simple fact, a single explanation or a unitary truth. Even better, the variety of complexities are usually deliciously oppositional.

For instance, we enjoy one of the world’s lowest crime rates and live in one of the safest environments the globe has to offer. And at the same time the number of deaths on our roads is remarkably high – traffic accidents are an everyday commonplace, so much so that, with humanity’s remarkable penchant for adaptability, we tend to accept driving past the blood-chilling wreckage of interlocked cars as a mere fact of life. Many actually slow down for a good old peek, an Eastern morbid fascination that irritates those from the West, who fidget and moan at the delays caused by the rubberneckers.

The response to a number of high profile road tragedies and the consequent growing howl of outrage from media and public was to introduce a huge number of new speed cameras. I don’t know how much radar the human body can cope with, but many of us are now being multiply irradiated daily (as well as being RFIDed by the glorious Salik system!) as the vast network of fixed and mobile radars grows. They’re springing up everywhere, particularly the mobile ones.

And the mobile ones are most fun.

It’s like Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner out there, it really is. They set them up behind bushes, traffic signs, concrete blocks, dustbins or any other roadside impediment they can find. They park up on the roadside with the radar gun and flash unit in front of the bonnet, set up by the tailgate or snuck into the back of an estate car. There’s even one unit that’s a van with a circular and rectangular window cut into the back to accommodate the hardware. All it needs is a sign on the side saying 'ACME Radar Unit'...

They set up the cameras and park their, usually relatively distinctive (in the Khawaneej area you’ll find a silver estate and a sea-green metallic hatchback are the cars of choice) motors around the corner so you don’t spot ‘em. One of them has the delightful habit of parking his car on the hard shoulder and putting the camera 200 meters or so back up the road from it so that the radar catches you before you slow down in case the car is a radar unit. This is only averagely sneaky – there’s one bozo in Sharjah who likes to set up his mobile camera a hundred metres or so after one of the fixed cameras, so they get you as you speed up past the fixed one. Like I said, it’s Road Runner style stuff!

But the one that really fires me up is the joker who sets up on my way to work: the Academic City road between Khawaneej and the Al Ain road. This four-lane stretch of gently curving asphalt runs through 100% desert: there’s not a house, factory or other building on it. If ever there was a road that should carry a 120kph limit (the UAE maximum), this was it. And the limit, insanely, is 80. It’s almost impossible to drive that stretch of long desert road at 80kph. You’d go mad. They’d find you naked and running, gibbering, through the ghaf trees.

So it’s rich pickings for our evilly giggling little friend. Convention dictates that radar cameras in the UAE trigger at 20kph above the limit. So you do 101kph down the Academic City road and he’s nailed you with a Dhs200 fine.

But wickedness can bring out the best in people. UAE nationals, expats, Europeans, Indians, Pakistani truck drivers and all – I’ve watched as drivers warn others about the hidden camera, flashing hazard lights, brake lights or even putting arms out to flag down those jazzing it up in the fast lane. I have thanked and been thanked in my turn by others as people from around the world are brought together, for a few brief and human seconds, by the collective desire to save our fellow men from the predatory and unfair practices of the Radar Rotter.

The Flight From Hell

The bloke in front is a serial recliner and has knocked the bottle on my food tray over twice. The bloke next to me is a hairy-armed expansionist and eats with his elbow waving in my face or hitting me constantly. The bloke behind me spends three hours cleaning his teeth with a sloppy sucking noise every 1-3 minutes, intervals nicely randomised to create a truly Chinese (although he might have been Korean) water torture effect. It sounds like the noises naughty children make in cinemas during love scenes. It's, literally, maddening. The bloke next to him is a serial talking bore with a honking, loud, nasal voice that cuts across every other sound and constantly interrupts your reading with banalities about life in the Middle East. At one stage he actually says 'You have to understand the Arab Mentality', which is a phrase that I loathe profoundly.

But at least they don't play a Modhesh video as we start our descent to Dubai...

* Rule One: Anyone who says 'You have to understand the Arab Mentality' invariably does so in tones that suggest they do. Rule Two: They don't. There isn't one. It's just dumb racism.