Arabia

I'm making a habit of this, I know, but I just wanted to sing Air Arabia's praises again. I've been doing a lot of work in Muscat recently and it just so happens that it suits me just fine to fly AA.

Last night I arrived back and cleared the airport in five minutes from walking off the bus from the plane.

I was punching air. Pleasant flight, no trays dumped on me by harrassed staff trying to get the airline's 'this is worth Dhs 2500' gesture out of the way. A nice, friendly (laughing!) crew, happy sounding captain on the tannoy, on time. Sharjah airport now has an e-gate. Pretty much everything you could want, a short flight that was more like a short bus journey - and I mean that in a good way.

Minimum hassle travel. I'd forgotten it existed...

Help

Around about now, a fund-raising run started at Dubai's Safa Park, opposite the co-op.

The training run is being led by blind runner Katie Newitt, the first blind person to complete the Dubai Marathon, and co-runner, Rebecca Janaway.

Proceeds from the run and activities around it will go to helping pay the rapidly escalating hospital bills of British expatriate David Nicholson, who remains in a coma in intensive care following his cardiac arrest three weeks ago.

David, father of five and loved by all who know him has dedicated much of his life to working with and helping children. He has lived in the Middle East for the last 26 years, formally in the Royal Marines and latterly as a freelance PE teacher.

Crippled by arthritis for the last eight years, he was unable to afford health insurance. He is now faced with huge medical bills. If you know David and want to make a contribution to cover the cost of his care there is also collecting box at the Bookworm bookshop in the Park n’ Shop car park, off Al Wasl Road. Anyone wishing to contribute in any way should please call Susie on 050 5595270, email: kmail@emirates.net.ae

Why is he not at Rashid Hospital where care is free? They do not have, and do not anticipate having, a bed for him.

Don't get sick, people. Don't get sick.

Playing

The majority of the online Arab World will play this game today.

Mark my words.

It's here.

(You have to be impressed at the sheer speed of this!)

Text

There's an increasing body of anecdotal evidence that many companies are cutting back on staffing, although they're not going around telling the papers and, from the coverage we're seeing, the papers aren't really asking that much. There seem to be an awful lot of low-profile tens and fifteens behind those few high profile five hundreds.

What I have found amazing are the stories of people who have been told by text that they don't have jobs any more. An SMS the night before, telling them not to bother turning up at the office.

Sacked by text message! It doesn't seem to be the kind of thing you'd find in the 'Good HR Handbook' does it?

Car

Let's just assume for a moment that someone you dislike intensely is humming 'Scarborough Fair' in a really, really annoying and insistent way. And that you react by shoving a broken child's plastic descant recorder up their nose with some considerable force so that it is stuck there. And that you then plug their mouth with a dead stoat.

Now let us postulate that you have recorded the subsequent attempt to continue humming that tune using a microphone without a pop-shield that is in turn fed through a fuzz-box. And that you crank up the amplified result of the whole wonderful set-up through a hundred-watt Marshall guitar amp.

You are starting to get an idea of just how unbelievably annoying Al Habtoor Motors' Sharjah Service Centre's music on hold is.

Once you get through the frantic parpings of Simon and Garfunkle's VL-Tone Greats, you get automatically routed to an extension that is permanently engaged. Dialling zero means being routed to a resentful-sounding individual who will then consign you, with no sign of having a guilty conscience, to whole minutes of Scarborough Hell. And then you get the service centre man. Which is where the fun really starts.

"Hello."
"Hello."
"Hello."
"Hello."
"Look, let's just take the hello as read, shall we?"
"Sorry?"
"Never mind. I want to book my car for a service."
"AC not working?"
"No. Service."
"Yes, this service centre."
"I know that. I want to book for service."
"You want for service?"
"YES!"
"OK. You must call to make booking."
"I AM CALLING TO MAKE A BOOKING!"
"Hello?"

You get the gist. But let me assure you that this conversation goes on for a long, long time. I do love it when service time comes around. Not.

Forgotten

I'd forgotten about my promise to make you all suffer from having to read my bi-weekly bibble in Campaign Middle East until pal CJ reminded me. So here y'all are:

Is the newspaper dead? And if not, when is it going to do the decent thing? The question is being posed with a frequency which reminds me of the assertion that we could look forward to a ‘paperless office’ back in the 1980s. It’s this year’s big prediction, but it’s also being accompanied by some amazing ‘nose dive’ statistics about falls in circulation, advertising revenue and even job cuts, with the UK’s The Independent slashing some 90 editorial jobs recently.

Now we’re mightily behind this particular curve here in the Middle East, without a doubt. I don’t think journalists will be looking over their shoulders quite yet. And the insane block on sites like Flikr remains, too, slowing adoption of the technologies that are supplanting newspapers in other markets. For instance, many people online followed the recent violence in Mumbai, mixing ‘traditional’ media sources online with extensive on the spot photojournalism from Joe Public in Mumbai (on Flikr, so you couldn’t see it in the UAE) with a wave of Twitter tweets, blogs and Facebook conversations. Wikipedia’s entry on the violence was up, being debated and updated, as the incident was ongoing. There was little to be known that wasn’t known on the spot – the next day’s newspaper has a hard job staying relevant in a multimedia news environment like that.

Even Rupert Murdoch has said the future of newspapers isn’t ‘printing on dead trees’ and, following the US’ ‘digital election’, the online presence of key media such as the UK’s Guardian and the US’ Christian Science Monitor is growing faster than their paper presence is declining.
Having said that we’re behind the curve, there are some interesting online plays in the region. From AME Info through Zawya, Bawaba and Maktoob through to ITP’s arabianbusiness.com, the region’s websites are a growing presence in people’s reading habits. Newspapers are jostling with websites to get the story ‘up’ first: websites that have far bigger regional reach and immediacy than any newspaper could possibly hope to compete with.

Does that mean that we should all ignore newspapers? No! Of course not!

Not yet, anyway...

Phew!

Gulf News back up to a healthy 1.2kg this morning.

So there isn't a recession after all!

Weighty

I have often referred to that most marvellous of newspapers, the leviathan Gulf News, as a 'weighty tome' or a 'multi-kilo wodge'.

It looks like that's changed. Today's GN was so light in the hand that I thought it had been home baked by the legendary Mrs Gleeson of Ballybrista.*

Being a little bit of a picky bear, I thought I'd take a look at a few past copies and see what's been going on around here. And so with the help of a micron-accurate scientific weighing instrument (a Dhs19 scale from Lal's) I was able to track back a handful of copies from the last couple of weeks. And this is what I found:

26/11 1300g
30/11 1200g
1/12 1000g
3/12 800g
11/12 690g

I draw no conclusions here. I merely present the statistics.


*Mrs Gleeson lives around the corner from Sarah's homeplace in Tipperary and cooks cakes and pastries so light that they float away. She does this using a massive iron Aga kitchen range that looks like you'd only really be able to roast whole cows in it, but somehow she conjures up amazing things from the monster.

Effical

I thought I'd share something that has really livened up our Christmas shopping.

It's Oxfam Unwrapped.

You buy a gift that benefits a community in need of help somewhere in the world, from assisting olive farmers through to buying a duck for a Balinese rice farmer, training a teacher, improving a community's water supply or a number of other things that will make a difference to someone who needs help more than we do.

And then Oxfam sends your friend/family member a card (or e-card) explaining that you've given them something perhaps a little more special than just the usual gift of something that, if they really wanted, they'd buy themselves.

I know you'll all think I'm being soft in the head, but I rather thought that it was all more in keeping with the spirit of the thing.

Jolly

A rather jolly little Facebook group has started to protest Emirates' smashing new policy of revoking business class lounge access for Skywards Silver and gold members travelling from its new, dedicated Terminal 3.

Why? Because the sparkly new lounges they bashed on so much about when they were launching the new terminal are 'too busy' apparently! So now all those nice, loyal Skywards frequent flyers are sent down to the old lounge in Terminal 1!!!

How potty is that? Thanks, Emirates! Join the Facebook group here.