Breakfast

Mr Ghulam, a lugubrious sort at the best of times, drove me to work today. He was tired: his first fare of the day had been at 4am to Jebel Ali from Sharjah, followed by another to Jumeirah. And so he had splashed out on a Red Bull – Dhs5 is a lot of money for a cabbie, but he considers the expenditure to be an occasional professional necessity.

We passed at least four ADNOC (Abu Dhabi National Oil Company) petrol stations, with trucks queued up off the forecourt and out into the street. This is because ADNOC is charging Dhs 4 (A little over $1) per gallon less than anyone else for diesel and 50 fils less for petrol. It’s saving Mr G’s company Dhs 150,000 a month, he says. The consequent surge in demand has been such that ADNOC is apparently bringing in private tankers to ship the stuff out to their service stations in sufficient volumes.

The forecourts at the EPPCO and Emarat stations we passed remained empty: you can almost hear the wind and see the tumbleweed. It must be killing them.

Meanwhile, Mr. G has necked his Red Bull and has become positively garrulous, “See? See?,” he spreads his arms out and laughs in a slightly worrying cackle. “Good feeling, not tiredness!”

Mr G is cleaner than Eddie Murphy. Brought up by a strict Pakistani military father (who served in the British Army, I am told with some pride), he’s never smoked or drunk and he doesn’t even do fizzy drinks like Pepsi and 7Up. I can only imagine what Red Bull’s doing to him. It must be a like a damn hard toot of the finest Columbian Marching Powder.

We pass another ADNOC: the queues remind me of the ‘70s, when my dad and I used to drive around together looking for petrol because OPEC was spanking the Western World.

Mr G. cackles maniacally, his knuckles white on the wheel and his foot alarmingly hard to the floor as we pass the petrol station, reduced to a blue and white blur as we near warp-speed: “Two gallons saving eight dirhams,” he cries triumphantly. “This breakfast cost!”

Indeed.

Journalist

I first came across John Mason when we were organising a big event for Jordan Telecom a few years ago: a big conference with 1,000 guests, regional, local and international media and all that good stuff. He was freelancing for the IEEE journal and covered the event from Spain, where he lived. He was always on the hunt for new stories from the region as he attempted to convince various telecom and electronic magazines in Europe to run his stuff and it slowly became obvious that John was not really like other journalists: I came to the growing realisation that our correspondence and his constant crusade to get freelance work were more about an old man keeping going and having something to do than they were about journalism and hungry freelancers. John had retired and, in fact, was in his eighties.

I always made sure he was on the press release list, although the feelance work never really came through for him and I was always very careful to reply to John’s requests, including asking a number of colleagues, on one occasion, if they’d collude with me in responding to questions about attitudes and outlooks of modern Arab women for a piece he was working on. One of my many blessings is that I work with a team of very modern, very Arab women...

Bit by bit, as we corresponded, I built a picture of John Mason. An American, John was passionately opposed to the Bush administration. I thought this was funny, given that he had worked for the American military and government as a young man. In fact, he’d flown over 30 tours on B17s in WWII, making him something of a war hero. He had travelled widely in the Middle East and was fond of the region and its people. He was horrified by events in Iraq and Lebanon.

Every now and then he’d email about some hope for a new piece or an editor who’d been open to an approach. This type of news gave him a great high. I’m not sure any of the pieces he worked on actually ran, but I do know that the whole process gave him enormous satisfaction.

I lost touch with him for a while last year and sent a quick ‘how are you’ email through to him in September. I’d helped him do some research on a story about Dubai Silicon Oasis and he was trying, unsuccessfully, to sell it to some European website or another. His summary of the DSO proposition and its likely success was wry, succinct and typical John: “I have a feeling that DSO is never going to amount to shit. I am sorry I invested my million dollars in it. Fortunately, I can spare it. I imagine you invested even more.”

I didn’t hear from him for ages after that.

You’ve probably guessed where I’m going with this already. This morning I received an email from John’s niece. He had given her a list of people to tell when and if he died.

She was at great pains to point out that John had died peacefully of plain old wear and tear: no dramatic illness, no scans and poker-faced doctors and no pain or lingering wasting. He simply died in his sleep, at peace.

John and I had never met. We had, in fact, only once spoken and that very briefly. But I am terribly, bitterly saddened by today’s news. The fact that he had such a rich life just makes it more poignant that it’s over.

Sofa

Dials 800 well-known laundry company.

Ring ring. Ring ring... click...

"Alo"

“Hello. You have an upholstery cleaning service.”

“Horse trading?”

“Upholstery.”

“Upper trade!”

“No upholstery. Up hols ter ee”

“Ah! No. This laundry.”

“I know that. You have a cleaning service for sofa. Furniture.”

“Ah! Sofa cleaning!”

“Yes. Sofa cleaning.”

“Yes. We have service. You have sofa?”

“Yes.”

“OK. What your location?”

“Muntaza”

“Moon Plaza?”

“Muntaza”

“Ah! Muntaza. OK. You call my man this number. He come for quotation.”

(I take the number. As a point of interest, it’s given as the last seven digits only, thereby failing The Du Test)

“Thank you.”

“No problem. What your name?”

“Alexander.”

“Ali Zafer.”

“No, Alexander.”

“Ah, good! Alexander. OK. You call, he come.”

Given the way the first call had gone, I have to say I made the 'call to man' in full anticipation of the fellow failing to turn up when he said he would, if at all, getting hopelessly lost, needing to be talked in from somewhere north of Bandar Abbas and being unable to communicate in any United Nations recognised language when he did finally arrive in our elegant and bijou abode. I have had many years' experience of this very scenario and it is now my default expectation.

But he turned up bang on time, miraculously arriving at the house all by himself, was straightforward, serious, smart and professional, gave us a quote and arranged to come back and do the work at the time of our choosing.

Negative expectation met with a positive experience: a brand building (and therefore, incidentally, inestimably valuable for the company) thing that, like a rare brandy, is wonderful and deserves to be savoured at leisure.

MmmmmMMMMmmmmm...

Water

Some time ago I put up a post about Aquafina, the artificially mineralised water from Pepsi, after compliant local journalists were herded around the Aquafina plant here in the UAE to be shown that it is, indeed, ‘pure’ water from ‘an underground natural source’. The resulting coverage represented hardly more than a faint 'baa' in response.

The problem was that the USA, where the Aquafina product was conceived, had seen a rising tide of negative media coverage regarding the fact that Aquafina was tap water that had been purified and then had been artificially mineralised using a mineral mixture perfected by the scientists over at Pepsico. Artificially flavoured, coloured and sweetened foods are accepted as the norm in America – but it would appear that even an American sensibility can be offended by the concept of an artificially mineralised mineral water.

Consumer protection bodies in the USA are strongly of the opinion, bless them, that labelling bottles of water with blue mountains, a table of mineral composition similar to labels found on pure bottled spring water, and the words ‘pure drinking water’ did not quite tell the consumer the whole story. That, for instance, ‘tap water’ might be nearer the truth. You’d be tempted to agree with them, no?

This had, in turn, prompted the local bottler here in the UAE to respond to the situation, in typically brilliant style, by refusing to admit that it was a problem at all and taking media for a tour around their bottling plant where, it was strongly asserted, pure water from an underground source was being purified, mineral balanced and bottled. The full story from back then is to be found here, along with the finer linguistic points that showed the entire press trip to have been a shameful attempt to mislead media – a media, incidentally, that was all too ready to desist from giving the story the really hard edge it deserved – and still does.

It is a great pity that people can still get away with behaviour like this in the Middle East, but it is a fact. If your appalling behaviour is challenged, stick your fingers in your ears and shout 'lalalalala' at your challenger and the problem will soon go away. The issue is that all too often that is precisely what does happen.

Last year, the consumer rights group that has lead the effort to ‘out’ Aquafina, Corporate Accountability International, succeeded in getting Pepsico to change the labelling of Aquafina to say ‘Public Water Source’. I’ve been keeping a vague eye out on the local water to see if it would change its labelling in compliance with Pepsico, but it hasn’t. Which rather struck me as a bit naughty until I checked out the Corporate Accountability International website for an update – and found that the organisation has embarked on a further campaign to highlight the fact that Pepsico has not, indeed, changed its labelling as it had, apparently, promised to do.

So do feel to pop along to the CAI site and use their handy 'send an email to Pepsico' thingy if you think we would all be better off, if not without artificially mineralised water, then at least truthful labelling of a product based on what is, in fact, municipal tap water.

Britpop

Fly to Bahrain. Foggy morning. Board plane bang on time, much to the expressed surprise of several pleased passengers. I think we’d all expected delays, the fog was pretty bad, so it was impressive indeed to be boarding. Get on board. Captain’s a right joker and announces that we’re looking at sitting on the tarmac for a two-hour delay. Haha. Except, as Jarvis Cocker tells us, I don’t see anyone else laughing around here.

It could be worse. I remember reading about a China Airways flight where the landing gear broke on takeoff, necessitating a three-hour flight in circles to burn fuel before the ‘plane crash landed. You can imagine the conversation being a tad stilted among the passengers. At least we’re waiting two hours to take off safely!

Anyway. We’re off now. An hour’s drive to the airport, two to check in, two on the tarmac and one in the air. It’s taken me almost a whole working day just to get to the start of my working day. I fly back again tonight: an 18 hour day in all.

Blur were right. Modern life is rubbish.

Bar

It’s smoky. There’s an old Khaleeji guy in the bar and he’s pissed, throwing back Heineken like the world’s about to end. He’s calling out to people, throwing lines of Arabic-laced Anglo-gibberish to anyone who comes into his orbit. I tell the barman that there’s no way the guy is flying, but he just laughs at me and tells me the chap comes every week and walks straight when he leaves.

The Asian kid next to me is dressed like he owns Facebook: jeans and Kenzo jacket. He’s drinking Corona, smoking a fag and jerking spastically as he plays with his hand-held games console, the smoke forces him to squint as he plays, moving his head to one side but still jerking his hands in response to the fast-moving LCD.

It’s dark, oddly ‘70s, seedy, all browns and beiges: a Bisto ‘aaahhh’ of grey smoke curling through the air.

The call to prayer sounds over the tannoy, but for Prince it’s still 1999. The Khaleeji guy is grinning like a maniac: “Brinze! Brinze! Kuweiss!” he calls out to his reluctant audience of Keralite and Sudani guys.

The South Africans are talking about piling systems.

I love the bar at Bahrain International Airport.

Vista

I’ve tried not to post this post, God knows but I’ve tried. However, some things I guess are inevitable and this event certainly seems to be.

I’ve upgraded to a new notebook, the Lenovo T61. It seems perfectly competent, but I was inordinately fond of my old T43 and really wanted the same but faster. The T61 is undoubtedly more powerful, but is actually bigger. I didn’t really want bigger. I should have waited for the incredibly sexy X300, I know.

But it’s not the Lenovo ruining my life. It’s Microsoft Bloody Windows Bloody Vista.

It’s hard to imagine anyone purposefully creating a more pointless, dumb and fundamentally irritating piece of software. Windows Vista is like having a constant visual conversation with Barney. Every time you try to achieve or accomplish anything, there’s a cuddly-purple-dinosaur-like dialogue box asking you if you really want to do that or telling you, for some irritating and unfathomable reason, that you can’t do it. Sometimes it offers you help and when you finally wade through a dense jungle of awful dialogue boxes to link to the Microsoft Loves You™ website, it smugly tells you that it can’t help you at all, really. It was just, one presumes, kidding. I’m already sick of waiting anything up to a minute for Windows Explorer to open. And I’m heartily sick of watching a damn blue circle coruscate calmingly as I wait for something, anything, to happen in response to my inputs. I haven’t spent so much time waiting for stuff to happen on a computer for a long time. But then it was complex stuff like drawing a fractal. Now I’m waiting for a basic dialogue box to appear.

I have upgraded to a significantly more powerful computer in order to wait longer for basic system events to take place. Explain that to me. It’s like wading in digital molasses. I’m slowly drowning in a sea of slo-mo, pricked to incandescence by stupid dialogue boxes telling me that the keyboard is the tappy thing in front of me, that I am a bipedal carbon-based lifeform and any number of blindingly obvious infodings that I simply do not want. I feel like a bull being goaded into blind fury before the toreador finally brings me to my knees with a cry of ‘Vistaaaa’.

I’m getting used to some new joys, too. For instance, the joy of finding my DNS settings or my browser homepage arbitrarily reset. The joy of hardware that refuses to work (Vista has convinced itself that the rather excellent Lenovo biometrics system is not connected to the computer).

Every time you try to achieve or accomplish anything, it’s like having a mad mid-Western voice suddenly explode in your head: “Hey! You’re trying to change those settings! That’s under the bonnet stuff, li’l buddy! Are you real sure you wanna go lookin’ under the bonnet?”

“Heyyyy! You’re sending an email! That could be real insecure! Press OK to send the email or just go on ahead an’ press Help to shoot yourself!”

I might sound angry beyond the point of reason. I am. I want XP back. Actually, I want Windows 98 back. Actually, scratch that. I want DOS back. I’ve been forced to the realisation that I’m using 2GB of RAM, 160GB of hard disk and a dual pipelined multiprocessing 64 bit microprocessor clocked at over 2 GHz to type and send letters 90% of the time. I used to use a 64 Kbyte, 1 MHz machine to do that and it was just fine. The only difference is that I used to print and send those letters and now I email them. How can it be possible to do so little with so much computing power and resource? Because there’s a fat, stupid bloated wodge of software between me and productivity and it’s called Windows Bloody Vista.

And yes, thank you. I do feel better now.

Flight

It’s such a typical Middle East story that I’m not going to bore you with the gory details. Suffice to say that I tried to book tickets for two relatives to come visit us over Easter using my abundant stock of Emirates Skywards airmiles and a few Dirhams more. It quickly turned into a 3-hour nightmare of pointless, long and frustrating conversations and music on hold that sounded like the Clangers playing Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares To U through long reeds inserted into their anuses. Sideways.

The websites didn’t really work very well (Am I the only person who thinks that the new Emirates website sucks at a deep and fundamental level?), particularly the Skywards site, which required customers to reset their cookies, clear the cache and stick marzipan copies of the Venus de Milo into their nostrils (they’re quite insistent on the last point) before it will allow even the simplest transaction to be contemplated.

So then you’re on to the call centres, which give you unparalleled access to morons who believe that your role in the transaction is to be led to the stun gun of their incompetence like cattle to the abattoir.

I ended up with one of two people’s tickets booked on a flight using Skywards Miles and being told to go to Emirates’ call centre to book the other ticket paying cash because Skywards couldn't take cash. Of course then the other ticket wasn’t available for under £1,000 – three times the price of any budget airline and pretty much double the normal Emirates fare for any other flight on that day. And the Emirates call centre couldn’t change the Skywards booking. So I had a useless Skywards ticket and a no-go madly priced Emirates ticket – and a couple flying on different flights on the same day – all with a great deal of ping-ponging between the two call centres and frenzied research on the EK website as the flights during the busy Easter period filled up around me.

Three hours and a great deal of tooth gritting later I got my two flights from the UK to Dubai: one on my Skywards miles and one using good old fashioned cash. Which is what I wanted, simply, to begin with. The angel that managed this was called Nikita and she simply did what could and should have been done in the first place: she helped me and was intelligent.

What amazes me is not that Emirates managed to waste three hours of my life, but that they wasted three hours of their booking staff’s time to complete a straightforward transaction that should have been simplicity itself and enabled by the website.

There was nothing that I wanted that was unusual or complicated. Just two tickets on one flight – using any combination (I didn’t care which combination) of miles and cash.

If there are many more like me out there, Emirates are blowing millions of Dirhams a year on managing long, complex and ultimately pointless transactions with furiously unhappy customers that are simply unable to conduct relatively simple and straightforward transactions on the company’s website or with its call centres.

Or perhaps I’m just unlucky...

Ancient

Gianni was musing the other week about the history of the Macintosh and generally having a ‘my first computer I ever had at work’ moment, which rather got me thinking along the same lines. And good golly, but he’s a relative newbie!!

So here’s the list of computers I've used in order of (remembered) ownership/use for work. Home is another thing entirely!

• CBM 96
• Tandy Model III
• Tandy Model IV
• Tandy IVP (The 22lb ‘luggable’)
• Apple II
• Apple IIE
• Apple IIC
• Tandy M100
• Tandy M1000 w/10mb external HDD (The 'look at me even a little bit wrong and I head crash' model)
• Tandy M2000
• Apricot F1
• Olivetti M10
• DEC PDP11
• THEN an Olivetti M24, Gianni Catalfanewbie!
• Toshiba T1600
• Compaq 386
• Compaq Presario
• Digital Pentium
• Fujitsu Laptop
• IBM T43 (lovely)
• Lenovo T61 (jury’s still out)

I remember laughing at the Lisa and furious arguments at the BASUG Apple user group about the evil 'closed top' Mac, 8” disk drives and the GEM GUI, proofing Ventura pages on a dot matrix and thinking that the Amstrad was a really cool computer. The Sinclair QL and the ICL One Per Desk (doomed from the moment someone said, 'Hey, why don’t we put a phone on a computer?'). The first computer I ever saw, in fact, was a Hewlett Packard mainframe that my school bought at huge cost (suppose it would have been a 3000 series) which was programmed using punched cards.

I think I’d better stop there, actually before the Geek Police come for me…

Lachrymose

One does try not to be an 'it ain't like it used to be' bore, but the sad truth is that Dubai was a great deal more fun in the 1980s than it is now. Sorry, that's just the way it is.

I used to enjoy listening to the tales of older residents when we first got out here; people like Sue and Pete Ellis, Gill Hollis and Shirley Robinson and Dorothy 'Dotters' Miles used to liven things up no end with old stories and photos of the days before the days when the Sheikh Zayed Road was two lanes of unfenced blacktop to Abu Dhabi. The days when Gill drove a Range Rover from Coventry to Dubai overland (well, apart from a roof-warping dhow trip from Iran) , when Sean Connery and company used to drink at the Aladdin Hotel in Sharjah (now a roadside garden) and when Hatta was a real day's journey.

And so this website, posted up to the UAE Community Blog by Localexpat is a truly fantastic thing for me: a hint of the Dubai whose last days I arrived just in time to see, a fleeting glimpse of an altogether more adventurous and really rather quaint life at the genteel edge of the explored world.

Do have fun at Len Chapman's website. It's truly a wonderful place and a little slice of history that really does deserve its own place on t'Internet. I recommend a nice cup of tea or even a 'cold one' and a good hour just to fossick about there...