Bankers

My favourite bunch of bankers, HSBC, have been entrusted with raising $4.2 billion to help finance Bourse Dubai's takeover of the Swedish OMX Exchance.

I can't trust 'em to send a transfer, issue a cheque book, credit card or basically offer any other normal high street banking service in an orderly, efficient and timely manner, let alone respond to any request whatsoever.

You wanna trust 'em with $4.2 billion, boys? Well, that's your lookout...

Vickie

When we originally left the UK for the Gulf, we had to sell our car. Back then, at the dawn of time itself, things at work had been a tad stressy: Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait had brought business in the Middle East to a grinding halt and that meant a great deal of corporate belt tightening – which had included giving back the shiny company MR2 T-Bar and getting my own car. Having been warned by Sarah that I could come back from the dealer driving anything I liked as long as it wasn't a Volkswagen Polo, I duly arrived home in a Volkswagen Polo.

Green with beige velour seats, equipped with manual brakes (it took three miles to stop from a 30mph start) and generally crap, it was soon clear that the Polo was a nono and would have to gogo. The ensuing search was a long one, but we finally ended up with a stunning car: a Renault 5 Monaco. A limited edition ‘hot hatch’ with leather seats, a powerful injected engine and electric everything, all the Monacos were brown with a gold speed stripe. But golly did that car move – and it held to the road like glue, too. It was about as fast as a GT Turbo but without all the insurance overhead, fun to drive and just plain peachy.

But we had to sell it to move out East and so duly put an advert in Exchange and Mart. Sure enough, the calls came in, including one chap calling from the East End of London: the Isle of Dogs to be precise. He was going to travel up to us in Hitchin (an hours' journey at least) and take a look at ‘ver motor’.

The day arrived and he turned up with his fiancée Vickie in tow. They walked around the car, poked around in it and generally started the whole slam the doors and kick the wheels thing. But then Vickie retired, looking sulky. Whatever-his-name-was continued to do the What Car 25 Point Inspection Routine, but it was clear that there was trouble in Paradise. He eventually went over to Vickie and they had a conflab. And then he came over to us and uttered these immortal words.

“It’s brahn.”

Both he and Vickie had that full-on East Enders meets Del Boy accent that uses the full stop as an invitation to sort of tail off the sentence on a long, limp downward cadence. You know, ‘Braaahhhhnnn.”

I was shocked, to say the least. The Isle of Dogs to Hitchin is a considerable schlep and the advertisement had clearly stated ‘Renault 5 Monaco, brown’. All Renault 5 Monacos had this in common, a version of the Henry T Ford promise: you can have the car in any colour you like, as long as it’s brown. Monacos were to brown what Kate Bush was to sex.

I might have revealed too much there. Onwards.

“We said it was brown in the advertisement!” I managed to gasp.

“Yeah,” he said. And then, morosely: “But Vickie don’t like brahn.”

That was 15 years ago. Ever since, we have both made each other laugh time after time when anything brown comes into our lives. It’s a joke that has run and run: “Vickie don’t like brahn.’

Yes, perhaps we are simple minded, but there it is.

Something struck me this morning as we passed, laughing, a new house that a local gentleman is building on our route to work and has, for some bizarre reason, clad in precisely the same shade of brown as the inside of a Crunchie bar.

I’ve never had the chance to thank Vickie for the years of smiles and laughter she gave us that day...

Connections

Remember the furore over Nokia shutting down its factory in Germany? This courtesy of pal Gianni who is dead right. It's genius. So much so that I nicked it from him! :)

Car

The Nissan Tiida. It’s one of the most annoying little cars on the road. It was launched with a completely bonkers campaign aimed at positioning it as a young and funky motor (rather than as a cheap office workers’ jalopy) which had me thinking for ages it was promoting Tilda, everyone’s favourite branded basmati rice. The final realisation, that the 60’s style funky bunch was actually promoting a low-cost runabout, was something of a let-down. It would have been an interesting rice campaign, at least. Rather than a Tiidious car campaign.

But the Tiida, a stupidly named car if ever there were one, is eclipsed by the Toyota Yaris. I simply can’t believe that anyone would call a car a Yaris. Try it in a Birmingham accent to appreciate just how appalling it is. Can you imagine the conversation their marketing team had?

“Great, team. Let’s brainstorm those names!”

“So, I thought of Viseon. Or how about Smasheon?”

“That’s really cool, Anne! Mike?”

“Well, thanks for that Anne. Sure, Tony: I came up with Avancea which for me really mixed the sort of dream and vision of Avalon with words like advancement and aspiration, you know?”

“That’s really good Mike! Any others? Simon?”

Simon is humble, his voice low. They have to strain to hear him as he speaks. “I thought of ..." They all wait, expectantly... "Yaris.”

The room explodes with excitement. Tony slams his fist down on the table. “Yaris! That’s simply brilliant Simon!”

Mike is sulking. He knows now that Simon’s going to get that promotion to head of market dynamics for the ARS region and Sukie won’t be talking to him tonight.

No, really. What were they thinking about? Anyway, I have some suggestions. I think Ford should launch a small car called the Wolk. Try it: it’s great. Use a sort of throaty American movie trailer voice and imagine a silver car whizzing around the Grand Canyon as a willowy blonde lets her purple scarf go and it flies into the winds above the silver streak handling impeccably along the winding, precipitous road. “The Ford Wolk. The freedom you need to live the life you deserve!”

And then Mitsubishi can launch the Spotch, just to screw them all up and take the market.

Threnody

So the Dubai Lands Department is slowly rolling up all the available real estate in Dubai’s delightfully eclectic and rather human Satwa area, making compulsory purchases that are causing howls of pain from landlords who believe (not unnaturally given the current trend in prices and the likely land use) they are entitled to a great deal more.

The tenants, a rather quieter voice, are being slowly ushered out – in cases this is happening before the rent cycle has finished and cheques are still being presented for rents on houses that people are being evicted from. Of course, in this instance, the tenant has no rights at all in terms of stopping these cheques: the landlords often ‘discount’ the post-dated cheques that tenants have to give for the coming year’s rental period, which means the landlords sell them to a bank in return for a percentage of their value in order to get cash up front. A cheque’s as good as cash in the UAE, so you can’t stop a cheque and if you fail to meet it, you’re immediately in the ‘wrong’ in the eyes of a legal system that likes to deal with simplicities to a degree of absoluteness that often descends into black farce. So if you default on a cheque, the beneficiary has the right to go to the police and have you arrested. The police won’t be interested in why you defaulted: the fact of the matter is that you did. So the tenants have to choice but to pay and then try to get their money back from the landlords. And, as anyone who’s had more than 10 minutes experience of living out here, that’s harder than getting your kid back from the Social Services.

I was down in Satwa Friday morning: I had to pop by the office. It’s wonderful to see the place waking up (which it does a great deal later on a Friday than on a weekday): the smells of cooking from the various restaurants and the garish shopfronts of the Dhs10 shops; the car accessory places already hurriedly slapping sheets of tinting on impatient customers’ Patrols and Altimas; the growing bustle in the supermarkets as an often bewildering array of people from all over the world wander along the sunny streets past the hanging displays of plastic toys, saris, second hand televisions and cooking pans. It’s a marvellous place, a real place: one of the few areas of Dubai that is truly organic.

And they’re going to replace it with yet another copy of Milton Keynes in the sun, another soulless slab of projects with a Prozac-induced strapline tacked onto its beige faux-adobe walls and smoked glass windows. Apparently even Safa Park’s going to go. And apparently Saudi super-investor HH Prince Walid Bin Talal’s the man behind the project. That’ll cheer up the landlords!

What the people doing this fail to realise is that Satwa is part of what makes Dubai interesting and unique: it’s like a rainforest – you might not think it’s terribly relevant, but this is where the oxygen and the material of life and biodiversity comes from. Pretty much every Filipina shop assistant in Dubai lives in Satwa – it’s cheap enough. If Karama is a little India, Satwa is a little Manila. You need places like Satwa for ordinary people to live, work and shop: for people to enjoy restaurants like Ravi’s, still the best Indian restaurant in Dubai, or Pars (Iranian), Al Mallah and Beirut (Lebanese). Satwa is the place where you’ll still find ‘poor’ stores selling cooking pots and charcoal; where cobblers will mend shoes for a few Dirhams and tailors knock up shirts for a few Dirhams more. This is the place where the plant souk rubs shoulders with the pet souk - a confluence that occasionally makes you think you ARE in a rainforest!

Cities need this: they need layers. What makes Cairo or Beirut great cities is that they are like great oak trees: they have the triumphs and scars of the ages written on them like the rings of a tree’s trunk: their walls and roofs reflecting the accretion of years of ordinary human beings living their lives, creating a diversity and tale of the passing years that makes the city so human and real. Even Amman, mostly settled since the 1920s, has layers of history from the past 2,000 years to the present day. So what if Satwa’s only a little piece of the past - it’s Dubai’s past. Which make it a little piece of something that is, in itself, small and rare enough to be treasured.

Dubai, so focused on its future that it has no time for the past, is slowly killing the things that originally made it a city worth visiting. The great Hatta track, like so many of the other tracks through the mountains that used to delight friends and family when they came visiting, is now black top. The beaches are so crammed with hotels that you can’t go camping or have a beach-side barbeque any more. The projects are tens of acres of soulless, squashed-together housing overshadowed by apartment blocks designed by architects from Toy Town. Thousands of hotel rooms and huge swathes of pleasure parks, stadia and artificial tourist attractions are going to stretch out into the desert from the beaches. And anything that isn’t regulated, new and air-conditioned is going to get steamrollered. So they’re going to tear down the Indian cantonment of Karama. And they’re going to rip the soul of of Satwa to give us an air-conditioned luxury shopping lifestyle megalopolis.

And not one solitary person who lives, works, shops or owns property in Satwa today wants this for its future.

Stoned

Remember the pointless promotional stone that computer company Acer sent to thousands of disinterested Gulf News readers way back at the beginning of summer last year? The one attached to the blob of ad-babble (‘Nature Shapes, Technology Creates. Individuality is yours alone to enjoy...’) that was rather pathetically promoting the Acer Gemstone laptop?

I had a desk clearout yesterday and found the blasted thing, lurking behind a pencil pot.

Obviously my bid to swap it for the moon á la One Red Paperclip has not really worked very well as evidenced by the fact that I don’t own the moon and I still have a small, smooth and black stone with a flaw in it lurking on my desk at work.

As some may recall, I tried giving it away to colleagues but no-one would take it. And I can’t really just throw it away after all this time: I feel the need to get some sort of value out of it.

But what? What on earth can you do with a piece of promotional stone?

Cable

It struck me this morning how much this FLAG/SEA ME WE cable outage must be hurting our good friends over at Du Towers given that their network is based on Internet Protocol telephony.

Poor old Du. It must be galling for them not to be able to take over the whole market by slashing prices left right and centre and so not realise one of the main upside benefits of an IP network, while at the same time suffering from the down-side of having an IP network - being horribly exposed to service outages when people drop anchors on your international cable infrastructure.

One of the reasons why the whole country didn't flock to Du when it launched was that the regulator blocked any price competition - mad, when you have an IP based operator launching against a ruggedly circuit-switched incumbent. However, in a perverse sort of way, Du is being paid off for being a not terribly interesting competitor, because it's able to charge circuit-switched telephone rates for an IP network - an absolutely enormous profit margin.

That this state of affairs exists because the regulator is so interested in protecting the vested interests represented by former monopoly and still massively dominant telco Etisalat is undoubted. That it is also artificially halting progress in the market is also undoubted.

However, the fact remains that the Du network is utterly reliant on the Internet to carry its international traffic - and that the recent outages have enabled a quietly gleeful Etisalat to announce that it is helping Du out. Du's response is evident in today's newspapers, a faintly ridiculous slice of blablabla press release announcing that there were now 1.5 million Du customers, which Gulf News for some reason carried faithfully in all its Technicolour puke-inducing glory.

So I called my pal who has a Du mobile and asked how his service had been, rather hoping (I must confess) for a horror story to pop on the blog. But he told me that he'd had no problems at all, that service had been completely unaffected by the recent Internet outages.

As he chatted to me, he started to break up until he was completely inaudible in a sea of pops, clicks and gaps. So I'm not really sure if the Du network has been affected by the cable outages or that's just the service quality he's used to. And I don't know anyone else who uses Du to ask - even though there are, apparently, 1.5 million of them out there...

Armageddon

Things are getting pretty apocalyptic around here. There's a dolphin with a flick knife slashing every undersea cable around: the SEA-ME-WE 4 and FLAG cables have both been broken in Egypt, the Falcon cable's gone in the Gulf and now Qatar's managed to lose a cable link as well. At the same time, the weather's screwed, there are earthquakes breaking out all over the Emirates (interestingly, this would appear to be a scoop for arabianbusiness.com - I can't find any other mention of it) and everyone's talking about expanding Salik. Well, to be honest, Matar Al Tayer's talking about expanding Salik, everyone else is talking about what a completely dumb idea that is: over 66% of respondents to an arabianbusiness.com poll have apparently said they didn't agree with any immediate expansion of the scheme.

Quick note for anoraks: SEA ME WE is an acronym for South East Asia, Middle East, Western Europe while FLAG is an acronym for Fibre-optic Link Around the Globe. Falcon isn't an acronym, it's a non-aquatic bird and so obviously the ideal namesake for a submarine cable.

Meanwhile, in unrelated news, a Dubai-based lawyer has come to the remarkable conclusion that not having AIDS or hepatitis is proof positive that unwilling, unprotected penetrative sex can not have taken place with someone who does have AIDS and hepatitis. Further findings expected from the city's progressive thinkers are set to include the incontrovertible facts that the earth is in fact flat, the moon is made of cheese and the stars are angels' daisy chains.

The latest Gulf News story on this trial is very unclear and appears to say that the defendant has been acquitted, but that just seems very odd. Any clarity to be had out there appreciated.

Serendipity

How strange after I posted that leaving HSBC bank in Dubai would be a Day of Joy. The young lady that processed our application for a new bank account at Lloyds was called Joy.

Joy

Note: This post might come across as grumpy. C'est la vie.

I have finally done it. On Saturday I have an appointment to visit Lloyds Bank Dubai Branch to open a local account with them. I’ve had an international account with the branch for over a year now and it’s been great – not a problem. My local bank, on the other hand, has been a different story altogether.

So this move will end 15 years of frustration and anger at a bank whose incompetence and blithering, mind-numbing stupidity at every imaginable level mark it as really quite special. The main thing that's stopped me moving in the past is that I have constantly been told that my lot was no better or worse than anyone else's. Having tried the grass over at Lloyds, I can tell you it's a damn sight greener over there as far as I can see.

I find it hard even singling out instances of my local bank's stupidity to regale you with, which is a shame as I’m sure some of them would be amusing to tell. But there are simply so many of them. My bank can’t be relied upon to take a faxed instruction for an international transfer and execute it. They have sent transfers twice, not at all, lost transfers and charged me Dhs 180 every time for the pleasure. Their call centre is laughable, a joke. You can’t speak to anyone in the branch, you’re routed straight through to the call centre. The call centre don’t have the contacts of the human beings in the branch you might at some stage wish to talk to. The call centre staff are plodding and pedantic. Their music on hold, infuriatingly, is frequently reduced by a technical hitch that has been there for years, to a condition approaching white noise. They always ask if there’s something else they can do for you when they have been unable to help you.

They have frequently blocked my Visa card (invariably just when you actually want it and always because of a security concern over a mundane and obviously routine transaction) without any attempt to contact me prior to instituting the block. They never block it when I do something mad like buy dinner for 15 people in Dubai on the same day as I've hired a car in London.

Their Internet banking service is marred by layers of maddeningly impenetrable ‘memorable questions’ passwords and other daft requirements. Their telephone banking service has a nine figure code that’s different to your bank account number. In fact, in order to use their services, you have to memorise over 30 digits of information.

I find it hard to talk to them now without being assailed by a feeling of deep-rooted loathing. I know that every transaction will, for some reason, turn into a sub-standard and frustrating experience. And yet my expectations, already lower than rock bottom, are never quite low enough to avoid disappointment with every new transaction.

And so, finally, I have been driven over the edge and am moving away. My old bank was the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation – known popularly as HSBC. It was the British Bank of the Middle East when I opened the account. Now I’m going to close it. I should have done it years ago. But damn, it feels good to know I’m finally doing it now!!!

The world’s local bank. LOL!