Kissing Tarmac

This has been an interesting week for me, involving much travel to Abu Dhabi. I used to think Abu Dhabi was the pits, a sort of sub-Sharjah, halfway between Dubai and Saudi in every way. Now I have come to appreciate it a little more. People who lived there always told me it was a great place to live, but I never really managed to believe them. It seemed, well, just sort of behind.

It seems like paradise right now. The first thing is, as colleague Mai pointed out, when you get there 'you can see the tarmac' - a prosaic way of pointing out that the roads are not a constant grind of bumper to bumper lane-swapping crawling pace madness.

People want to do business with you: they're not doing you a favour giving you the time of day.

Hotels are flexible and service-oriented, not process driven and hide-bound. Even the absurdly sumptuous, but nevertheless impressive, Emirates Palace.

There are locals. They talk to you. They're pleased to see you, friendly and open.

There's a sudden feeling of 'can do' attitude about the place. Abu Dhabi's changing - and fast.

I swear the driving's improved. I might just have gone mad, though.

On the way back this week, entering Dubai, we passed a poster for the RTA (Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority), congratulating itself on the wonderful achievement it managed on the opening of the Floating Bridge. And I really, I swear, started to wonder if a move wasn't really such a bad idea...

Salik. Nyer Nyer Told You!

I've got little to add to what is destined to be a tide of furious blogs on the news today that ten new Salik gates will be built, an expansion of Dubai's road toll system which will ensure that every which way you turn in Dubai, you'll get nailed. Those coming from Sharjah, Ittihad to Garhoud, will get nailed twice.

Mattar Al Tayer, the 'traffic expert', said that RTA was not considering expanding the scheme. I predicted back in July that this was dissembling. I'm sad to have been proved right.

And, again, appallingly communicated.

Some time ago, during the original fuss about Salik, I posted a wholly unhelpful Q&A on Salik. One of the questions was 'What happens if a chance stone hits my windscreen and the tag is damaged?' - of course, God has his way of doling out punishment - my windscreen now has a nice crack right across it from such a stray stone and, a police report, garage visit and insurance claim later, I'm now thoroughly irritated to find I have to buy a new blasted Salik tag. The good news is that they say they can transfer the balance. Let's see...

Du du du Dah dah dah

I'm a little hesitant to post about Dubai's most splendid and admirable new telecom operator Du again, because last time I took a pop at them the blog was flooded by readers from Du network addresses and picked up some really daft comments from people using Du's corporate network. You can tell they worked for Du because they had Du IPs and they also referred to Du as du which is something only a du employee would Du.

So they care too much, in short.

But I can't resist. We have a new special offer from the telecom operator that likes to say 'Whaaaaaaat?' in the form of a mobile package that offers you a new Du line for a mere 1 Dirham. Yes! Pay only Dhs 55 and get 54 Dhs back in airtime! That means just Dhs 1 for your super Du line!

Except that Dubai's new mobile operator's previous promotion offered subscribers a line for just 1 Dirham! All they had to do was buy a line for Dhs 155 and they got Dhs 154 back in airtime! That meant just Dhs 1 for your line!

The difference, smarter readers will note, is that they've dropped the package price by Dhs 100 ($27 or so, depending on whether we keep the peg of Dhs 3.657 to the Yankee Dollar, which seems likely).

I'm not sure I get it. They're trumpeting a million happy users, but they're dropping their pants on price and the barrier to adoption alike with a promotion that is pricing a new Du line at $15 and presenting it as a 98% cashback deal. Next it'll be a line for Dhs 2 - with Dhs 1 in airtime...

And I still have not had ONE person who has failed the 'Du Test'. So I'm still a little cynical about those million users, too.

If you can't sell a mobile line for Dhs 1 (30-odd cents), what CAN you sell it at? If the barrier to entry, at Dhs 155, is too high in a country with one of the world's highest GDPs per capita, what ARE they getting wrong?

Is dropping price the answer, then, for Du? Or is it time for the company to perhaps consider some smart, differentiated marketing together with a range of targeted service propositions that intelligently segmented audiences in the UAE will buy?

No, I thought not. It's back to mindless jingles and pointless promos then. Watch out for the 'Win a Bar of Gold With Du' promotion. It's only a matter of time...

Where In The World Is Barnaby Bear?

You know all that fuss about Gillian Gibbons, the teacher whose class named a bear Mohammed in the Sudan? An interesting (or perhaps not, you be the judge) footnote to the whole mad incident, which incidentally left many Muslim friends and colleagues frustrated and irritated by the behaviour of the Sudanese, is that the bear's real name is likely to be Barnaby.

How do we know this? Because Gillian's a British teacher, she's likely to have been teaching Key Stage 1 of the British National Curriculum to her kids (it was a Year Two class, I believe) - and the geography curriculum involves a bear (rather a celebrated bear, Barnaby is a registered trademark of the Geographical Association and even has his own website). There are a number of ways of using Barnaby to teach young children geography - one common geographical activity involves using Barnaby Bear, who is taken home by the children in turn at the weekends - they then 'write up' where in the world Barnaby Bear went over the weekend. Fun, no?

This particular Barnaby, believed to still be in custody in the Sudan, is likely to have had a slightly more interesting diary than most...

Now Game Shows Really ARE Torture to Watch!

Today's Emirates Today (oddly thin, recently, at 32 pages. If they cut a section, it really would be 24x7) comes with the delicious news that a new home-grown reality TV show is to be launched. The page 3 piece, which doesn't name the production company that is creating the show and that has 'already talked to three of the leading broadcast channels in the region', outlines the novel concept they've come up with.

And, I have to agree, it's a classic. It had me in stitches of helpless laughter.

The show will 'pit individuals against each other in a competition that conveys the social nature of human beings' according to Emirates Today's story. This translates into a most novel concept indeed. In fact the six finalists will be locked in a room with nothing but basic amenities and the winner will be the one that outlasts the rest.

Of course, attempts at 'Big Brother' type shows in the Middle East have failed in the past because of negative public perception and, at times, reaction to the concept of having people sleeping together communally. So now we get over that hurdle by locking them in solitary!!!

The winner can expect to gain the added prize money from each contestant that drops out and also get a car at the end. The prize money could be as much as Dhs 100,000, gushes the show's co-creator, Anjum Fatima, in the ET story.

So each contestant will be paid Dhs 1,000 per day for going insane in a situation only normally imposed as a form of punishment or torture. Brilliant. Solitary confinement as a game show. Only someone quite mad could have thought this up - let alone how mad you'd have to be to allow them to execute the scheme. Nothing like as mad as the contestants are going to be by the end of it, though...

Whatever next? Chinese Water torture? 24 hour electro-shock therapy beamed direct to your home?

Torture TV. It's the way ahead!

Infinite Patience

Today's newstabulous Gulf News came shrouded in a four-page wraparound for new company Dubai Infinity Holdings. As, in fact, did a number of today's papers. With little information beyond the usual breathless focus-group mumbo-jumbo that is becoming so popular these days ("an innovative investments enterprise that empowers partners and communities to excel", for instance. Or how about "Our value add is anchored in sharing innovative insights, knowledge, creativity, human capital and strategic direction."), including a tagline of 'Empowering you to excel'.

The company, according to the ad, was 'Born on the 2nd December 2007', but there's nothing I can find in the papers to reflect a launch announcement yesterday.

Curious to learn more, I went to the website given in the ad - given that there's little more information given in the four page advertisement than that I have quoted above, one would be forgiven for perhaps wanting to find out more about quite who it is making all this noise.

The website, brilliantly, consists of a flash animation of the company's logo and the message 'Coming soon'.

The only call to action possible from the advertisement was the move to the website to find out more. By not having more on the website the morning the ad broke the company, whoever it is, has effectively wasted that money by ensuring that those answering its call to action were disappointed.

This, I humbly submit, is not terribly clever marketing. Particularly when even the most stubbornly Luddite marketers are having to recognise the absolute criticality of the Internet.

National Day

Everyone's going crazy about National Day. Not me. I'm going camping. But I'm still generally happy for them all and do derive a great deal of enjoyment from their frenetic (and often quite insane - I mean who, in their right mind, PAINTS their car with a flag for national day?) celebration of nationhood.

I love the story of the formation of the Emirates: the transition from the Trucial States (the Brits made them all sign up to stop bashing each other and raiding unsuspecting passing dhows, hence 'trucial') to the UAE was accomplished in less than three years after a Brit in a bowler hat landed at Sharjah Airport with the news that Her Majesty's Government had (finally) realised the game was up, the Empire was no more and we were generally doing a Pontius Pilate on every obligation East of Suez.

This gave these guys a couple of years to define the constitution, acceptable system of governance, administration and identity of a modern nation state. They hadn't really been, errr, trained for it. The remarkable figures of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan and Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed were to play a critical role in forging the United Arab Emirates out of the messy and time consuming negotiations that at one time or another involved Oman, Qatar and Bahrain too.

It was all made worse by the fact that the dirty deed had been done by a Labour government - and the Tories had hinted strongly that they'd undo it. So the Trucial chappies didn't get down to it as seriously as they might right up until it became clear that the Tories were as full of it as the average backed-up septic tank.

The result has been the Federation of states that make up the UAE - clockwise: Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Qawain Ras Al Khaimah (which didn't sign up 'till a year after the others) and Fujairah. All have coastal and inland holdings, all have territory nested in each other (Go to Hatta, the inland town of Dubai, and you'll likely cross Sharjah, Ajman and Oman on your way) because the territorial division was done along the lines of tribal affiliations and all have totally separate police forces, municipalities and, in the main, public services. The result is often quixotic at best - but it works, somehow. Eventually. Mostly.

So what if they struggle at times to get things like the legal system to work properly (or even... sharp intake of breath... Salik). They defined a nation in three years and built it in 30 - an infrastructure that is still, of course, being built out in breathtaking, if sometimes slightly crass, style. The Brits were decimalising and worrying about Europe when the UAE was being born. I was personally involved in making my first ginger beer plants and hating girls at the time. I have since, by the way, continued to like ginger beer and considerably improved my opinion of girls. But I can't claim to have built a nation...

So here's a National Day toast: good luck to them, warts and all. We're here because it's better than there, after all.

Aren't we?

Cometh the lift, cometh the hour

What would appear to be a substantial part of Dubai's community appears to believe that, if you are on the ground floor, you call a lift by pressing the down arrow. This is, if you stop to think about it, quite logical. If you are on the ground floor and the building is three stories high (as is our office building), then the lift is three times more likely to be up than down. So you press down to call it down.

No?

In life's game of chance, of course, it is always possible that the lift is in the basement. In which case, pressing the up button will improve the odds significantly. Now you have supplemented your three in four chance of bringing the lift to you with a one in four chance of bringing it up. It's a dead cert that the lift is in the bag!

This is the reason why I often find the lift door opening in the basement, revealing a sea of puzzled faces. "Why?" They seem to be saying, "Why are we here?"

A question that I tend to relate to. Particularly when the lift arrives too full to accommodate one slightly irascible addition. I even, on one occasion when overdue leave, put the question to the assembled company. I am ashamed to admit I shouted it. But they just stared silently and large-eyed back at me until the doors closed and took them away.

But this is not the end of the story. Because lifts are not the smartest of devices. A lift, when it has been called to go down using the down button and then arrives at the basement, not unnaturally believes that it has fulfilled its purpose in life. And so whatever floor you have selected before the lift arrived at the basement is therefore cancelled, waiting for the next satisfied customer to select a floor. This often means that travelling, say, to the third floor from the basement, the people who were already in the lift when it arrived in the basement end up missing their intended floor on the way up, too. I am sure there are people who have spent the whole day in the lift, wondering how come their floor never seems to appear.

When you add to this the fatal attraction of the comb, you start to understand how it's so hard to get a lift in so many of Dubai's buildings.

Many lifts have mirrored back walls. And that would be fine except for the fact that many people can't look at a mirror for more than a few milliseconds without suffering from the sudden urge to whip a comb out of their back pockets and tidy their coiffure. This urge is deeply seated at a Pavlovian, even genetic level and far stronger than the urge to select a destination. I once shared a lift with a gentleman who noticed a spot and subsequently happily went about squeezing it, to the intense discomfort of those around him.

A colleague cracked some time ago and posted 'How to use a lift' posters next to all the lifts in the building. This was a noble, if ultimately futile, gesture. Any fule no that you press 'down' to call the lift down to you, after all.

They'd better have upwards of 50 lifts in the Burj Dubai. You could be stuck for days waiting for a lift otherwise...

Bad News Day

It was British Labour government spin doctorette Jo Moore who famously sent out a memo suggesting that government departments might find that 9/11 was a good day to put news out if they wanted to bury it. Moore was found out and ended up getting her career pretty effectively buried, of course.

Which has little to do with this post except that some terrifying news has come our way but the government seems to have buried it during a period when news has been dominated by the air-show, the Big 5 exhibition, the Red Bull FlugTag (good fun, great PR) and, of course, the upcoming Rugby 7s, the annual event where 10,000 animals are herded into a pen and fed alcohol until they become anti-social and leery.

What news could be so sinister, so awful? Wait'll I tell yer...

The government is going to 'regenerate' ageing areas of Dubai, according to the report we found in Middle East Economic Digest (MEED), including Sheikh Zayed Road and *sob* Satwa. You can view the full appalling story at Arabian Business.

Dammit. Satwa is where our office is. We like it here.

So the news has resulted in much amusing speculation from colleagues, including new names for the 'regenerated' Satwa: New, New, Old, Old Town; Satwa Boulevard; Satwa Lakes or Satwa City. Some other ideas could include 'JustbehindJumeirahOneCityofWonders' or how about 'Satwa Community'?

We're expecting ski-slopes, dolphinariums and theme parks where before there was a plant souk, a bus station and myriad shawarma joints, shoe repairers, car upholstery shops and all those other diverse little shops that make a city, well, human.

Now we're going to be bulldozed and replaced with faceless skyscrapers and shopping malls coloured that Dubai Dun colour that has taken over everywhere; we're going to be bombarded with the usual realtors Prozac-speak: "Elegant Living in the Old City" and all the rest of the tosh they push out. Golly, there's probably going to be some sort of Old Satwa display in one of the new shopping malls.

Dowdy, down at heel and raggle-taggle, Satwa is one of the last few truly human places left Dubai-side. And now it's going to get morphed, like everything else, into The Projects.

*sigh*

Moaning Minnies

A number of people have complained that I haven't been posting here but that I have been posting there and they don't like it because the food stuff is boring.

How can food be boring? Philistines!

Anyway. I'll try and post here some more as well. But don't blame me if it's not funny, mature or clever.