NufNuf’s Last Freakout?

Image by K!T via Flickr

I have already told of my delight at the fact my new Nokia N86 8MP (or 8PM or whatever it is) has a built-in SatNav that can negotiate the terrifying urban-planner road grids of the desert oasis city of Al Ain but NufNuf, as we have christened her, got her acid test last Thursday.

Trouble was, I didn’t know she had been using quite such high quality acid with such gleeful abandon.

I did my usual Thursday morning slot on Dubai Eye Radio’s Business Breakfast, sharing it with special guest star Rebecca Hill, the director of the Middle East Public Relations Association or MEPRA. Presenter Brandy Scott, Rebecca and I had a happy blether about the new Middle East Public Relations Awards that MEPRA is launching for the first time this year.

A slight twist in the tale was that Rebecca and I were due in Abu Dhabi, a good 2 hour drive away, to present a MEPRA Twitter Workshop. This was to be the third of a series of MEPRA Twitshops presented by Spot On Public Relations’ MD and partner in crime Carrington Malin and yours truly. It was supposed to start at 9.30am, and the radio slot ended at 7.45am so we were already a tad tight for time. If we didn’t get lost in Abu Dhabi, the city of a Million Confusing New Roadworks, we might just get to the meeting room by the time a desperate Carrington faced down a packed room of some 40 agitated PR professionals jeering and throwing buns and stuff.

I’m not a big Abu Dhabi boy. The last time I was down there I got horribly, irrevocably lost. In fact, every time I’ve done down there I’ve got lost.

Everyone in Abu Dhabi says the same sort of thing to you: 'Oh, it’s easy, just turn right by the intersection with Sheikh Zayed 1st or 7th Street, take the second left by the Bilbalbol Sebastopol Lebanese Supermarket and we’re the building behind the purple railings you’ll see the third watertank down from the second dustbin to your left as you face the coffee pot opposite the blue mobile phone shop sign. You can’t miss us. Everyone knows it.'

The invariable result is a hot, sweaty and frustrated mess. Harried and hooted by Abu Dhabi’s aggressive and unpleasant drivers, you drive round in ever-decreasing circles until you finally explode in an act of spontaneous combustion. By some miracle of trial and error you’ll finally find your destination (in a completely different place to that described to your by your potential host and somewhere that nobody in the world has heard of) and be met with a smile and a genial, 'Did you find your way alright?'

This, then, was a job for NufNuf the Nokia SatNav. Get us there first time around. And by golly, she almost did it. The trouble started when we hit the Eastern Ring Road, which NufNuf thought was still desert. She also lost the GPS signal. And she started to have a head-fit that resulted in a strange and electrifying silence. There’s nothing worse than driving with a SatNav and approaching a T-junction to the sound of silence. Whichever way you choose to go, unguided by ‘the voice’, you’ll hear ‘Route Recalculation’.

After a silent eternity and some panicky guess-work, NufNuf suddenly sprang into action again and, thanks mainly to her, we got there with half an hour to spare. Pats on the back panel for NufNuf, then.

But the journey back was a totally different affair. My first mistake was swapping Rebecca for Carrington (when offered a swap of male for female company, people, demur. That is my advice. Demur.). My second tactical error was ignoring NufNuf’s calm ‘Follow The Road For One Kilometre’ for Carrington’s snatched, ‘No, that’s crap. Turn left here.’

I mean, one of these people is a professional SatNav, after all!

That unscheduled turn started us on a nightmare, harum-scarum journey through the busy, alienating skyscraperscape of Abu Dhabi that I will not forget in a long time. Because NufNuf freaked out.

'In 300 Metres, Turn Right,' said NufNuf. And then, 'Turn Left' She added calmly in an almost reassuring voice.

'In 200 Metres, Turn Right, Then Left.' Okay. We turn right. 'Turn Right.' Umm, we just did. 'In One Kilometer, Take the U-Turn.' But what about the Left Turn? 'Turn Right here.'

What?

'Turn Slightly Right.' Umm, 'Turn Left.' Whaaat?

The car behind me is blaring its horn, the lorry to my left is cutting in to the right and there’s a LandCruiser undertaking me from behind. The ubiquitous sound of beeping is like an experiment in sensory deprivation, drowning out every other sensation but fear, an auditory waterboarding. My mouth is dry as we swerve to stay alive.

By now NufNuf has lost the plot completely. 'GPS signal lost. Route Recalculation. Turn Left Here. I Am An Armadillo. A Moose Once Bit My Sister. Please Hold, Your Call Is Important To Us. We are the Borg.'

But if NufNuf was being scary, Carrington was worse. Every time NufNuf did her next HAL9000 Goes Insane As He Starts Dying Scene impersonation, he’d talk over her with some new pronouncement of techno-doom. 'It’s gone mad. We’re going to die. Nobody will ever find us. Turn Oval here.'

Between them, they manage to dump me into an insane world of techno-fear, acid flashback surrealism mixed with real-life, heart-attack inducing danger.

We finally made it to the ring road, recognisable monuments looming into view. ‘Would you like fries with that?' said NufNuf in a reassuring voice as Carrington leaned back with a pleased sigh of ‘Told you the bloody phone was wrong!’

Next time I’m taking a taxi and leaving Carrington and NufNuf together. They’re made for each other.

For the first time, I see my own disintermediation as a positive blessing...

Tossers

Image by ronin691 via Flickr

Customer (Alexander McNabb) - 08/02/2009 05:58 PM
Once again - the email you sent to me has a link to a page on the Corel site that just displays 'null' - responses to the email bounce back. It's very, very frustrating trying to respond to you people - with the constant reminder that if I don't manage the impossible, getting through to you, you'll close the support question ticket in 72 hours and so waste all the time I have had to invest in this issue.

I fixed it in the end by myself, both the issues with Corel Photopaint and Corel Videostudio, by booting the apps while holding down the F8 key to roll back to the default user space. Both apps are now working.

All that effort reinstalling apps and deleting registry entries, when cleaning the user space did it.

Maybe a first try gambit next time around.


Response (Robby) - 08/07/2009 11:59 AM
Dear Mr McNabb,

The direct link to reply which displays Null is a known issue. You should reply by going to the support site. Other emails not coming from a support personnel is an automated one which you can just ignore.

To close this support ticket, please go to My Stuff at support.corel.com or simply do not reply to this support ticket.
Kind regards,
Corel Customer Support

"The direct link to reply which displays Null is a known issue." - Every damn email Corel Customer Support sends to its customers from one of its laughingly titled Customer Support Representatives (you'll see from the above that he was no use at all) contains a link with the words "To access your question from our support site, click the following link or paste it into your web browser.” That link is broken, forcing you to go navigating their website to track down your issue.

And yet they continue to send the broken links out to customers!! Because, presumably, if it is a ‘known issue’ then it can’t be a ‘problem’!!!!

Gnnnnnn!!!

Scorn

It’s perhaps interesting many of the marketers who are taking social media seriously are seeing a campaign platform rather than a fundamental change in the way the business communicates and, indeed, behaves. That’s fair enough, it’s a wise person who dips a toe in the water before going for the full-on dive bomb and it doesn’t take the wildest imagination to see what’s going to happen to Young Roger as he faces the directors in the mahogany-panelled boardroom and suggests they might like to gamble the future of the company on Twitter.

But a campaign-led approach to social media really does need to be framed in the context of a wider move to adopt social platforms to transform the company’s communications, it can’t just be a tactic.

That does mean writing a new rulebook and challenging some very entrenched attitudes and procedures – it’s an early adopters game, too, requiring a willingness to take a transformational approach to aspects of the business. It can be a two-track process of gradual change, there’s no need to try and change the world overnight, but it does have to involve an element of change. Declaring that you’re cool and down with the kids then running a Twitter competition to win a super prize is not what social media’s about – and neither is tacking a Facebook page onto the tail end of that expensive regional TV and outdoor campaign.

Agencies and clients alike have to be careful of 2.0wash – the temptation to stick a blog, Facebook fan page and Twitter ID on every pitch PPT. Although that might sell to the credulous, it’s not doing the client any favours in the long run, just creating a range of disparate, off-message and wild communications with no follow-through. You wouldn’t recommend that kind of behaviour with a ‘conventional’ campaign, so why do so with social media?

Without a planned, consistent communications strategy behind it, a social media campaign as a tactic is in very real danger of making the client look flaky. And social media, incidentally, has evolved a very special way of treating such campaigns – public scorn.

This piece originally appeared as one of the chucklesomely named 'A Moment with McNabb' columns in Campaign Middle East magazine, which doesn't have a website so I have to post 'em on my own blog. Ironic, I know.

Another Bunch of Total Bankers

Image via Wikipedia

I can’t say that my 15-year relationship with my bank has been a happy one. Strangely enough, things were better back in the days when they used to have Bedouin guards at the door of the Bur Dubai branch and when you had to visit the branch for every transaction. That’s perhaps because life was different then and it was expected that any transaction would necessitate your physical presence, in banking, business and government.

The advent of automation has brought an end to all that, saving us all hours of unproductive and needless hanging around and meetings – now we can buy things, process things and generally get things done online. This is particularly true of banking, where telephone banking and Internet banking both mean that contact with the bank’s staff is reduced to an absolute minimum.

I, for one, am delighted at that because every single encounter with the morons has my blood pressure in the stratosphere faster than an Apollo mission that’s late for tea.

Sadly, many banks in the UAE appear to make broadly the same mistake. These days, when people seek to escalate to a human being, it is usually because there is some exception to the normal routine, a need to talk to someone who can go beyond the ordinary and actually help to find an intelligent solution to a problem that goes beyond the 'system'. If we could sort it out using the system, we wouldn’t be on the ‘phone or, God forbid, dragging our sorry butts into the confusing and vaguely dehumanising environment of the branch. So offering customers a disempowered goon who merely looks at the same information that’s available to us all on our own screens at home and sits grinning like a mildly embarrassed macaque really isn’t going to cut the mustard.

This has always escaped banks in general and, I feel, my bank in particular. The bank makes getting through to an actual, identifiable person in the branch really quite difficult. And when you do, they are uniquely unqualified and unable to help in any way whatsoever. Their job titles are inversely linked to their capability to do anything if my Status Account Special Customer Service Miracle Worker and Glorious Helper are anything to go by. Worse, some clot in management has dictated that they should end every call with “Is there anything else I can do to help you?” Given that most of my calls are frustrating exercises in migraine-inducing head banging that do not actually offer me any solution to my initial problem, this sign-off is ever-increasingly in danger of having me committed for some awful crime of passion.

I’m even starting to get a Pavlovian reaction to the sound of tapping keyboards. I break out into a sweat, knowing what I’m about to hear: “That’s not possible, sir. Is there anything else I can do for you today?”

HSBC has recently taken to gleefully refusing to honour my cheques, for instance. Given that I have written hundreds of cheques over my fifteen long years with them, you’d think that I had been injured in my right hand or had some other major life change that would explain why my signature is suddenly so different, but no – it’s the same old signature. Adding insult to injury, it’s quite a distinctive signature, a megalomaniacal scrawl that makes scrip-writing doctors pause to admire its complete lack of similarity to anything that could approximate to a reading of my name. But I like it and it has always been so. I’d post an example for you to see, but that would be silly in these criminal times. You’ll just have to take my word for it: I have the signature of a madman and it is uniquely, utterly and compellingly distinctive.

When the bank returned my cheque to the AC maintenance company, we bit the bullet and set off for the branch, our packed lunches in little chequered cloth bundles strung on the end of beanpoles. We knew it was going to be a long haul and we were right. The solution, after much frustration, keyboard tapping and idiotic grinning, was to rescan my signature. Super. Done.

Finding that they’ve done it again, only this time to Emirates Post for the renewal of our PO Box, was mildly disconcerting. Emirates Post, of course, takes six months to process the returned cheque and tells you there is a problem by blocking the PO Box rather than actually communicating with you in any way. But I was amazed that nobody had actually told me they'd refused a cheque months ago.

I called to ask why the bank has now taken to multiply dishonouring my cheques without any reference to me. I did take the opportunity to point out that honouring a customer’s cheque was perhaps the most basic of banking services and that maybe a bank that couldn’t get that first step right shouldn’t even be trying the more complicated stuff.

“We tried to contact you,” said the gurgling nincompoop on the line.

This was an interesting tactic. I have never in my life received a missed call from the bank – and my mobile is on 24x7. What’s more, you can get in touch with me via voice, SMS, voicemail, landline, faxline, email – I access my home and work email at all times, sadly even on the mobile now - or even using the awkward and badly implemented Internet banking email box system. I roam. I’m not even going to start on the number of online tools and forums you can catch me on. Let’s just say that if you want to get in touch, I am pretty much infinitely contactable. In fact some people have complained that they can’t actually avoid me.

I asked who tried to contact me, when and through which method. “We don’t know,” said the ‘poop. So how did he know they had tried to contact me?

Silence.

I shall draw a merciful veil over the rest of the call. But I am now stuck with a bank that blocks my Visa card following everyday transactions with vendors I use frequently, fails to make transfers as instructed, charging me for the consequent exchange losses, and now dishonours my cheques without notice or reference to me.

None of that would be a problem if they had someone that could undo the damage, a sort of SuperBanker. But they don’t, they just have disempowered nincompoops who lie rather than actually go to the effort of tracking down a problem. Because customer service is the very least of the bank’s concerns – the least of its investments and the business process it gives least consideration and resource to managing. And you have to admit, when a highly profitable global organisation’s customer service is infuriatingly process driven, badly managed and inept at every level, the cause of universal howls of frustrated complaint from the vast majority of its customers, you’d be forgiven for thinking that perhaps we’ve all got it wrong. Perhaps the secret to being a great business is actually to set out to royally piss off your customers as a business strategy! Maybe McKinsey or someone has told them to do it and so that’s what they’re actually doing – actually investing in annoying customers.

If so, they’re damn good at it.

Dust

Marjorie Dawes would be happy with life in Dubai right now. There's quite a lot of dust about.

It's everywhere, a miasma of fine, irritating powder suspended in the air and reducing visibility to a few hundred yards. I'm constantly clearing my throat, my hair feels like chicken wire and the car is downstairs having a fine layer of abrasive sand ground into its paintwork by the watchman, who is a closet Green and believes in using minimal water to wash a car.

In case you're interested, it's been blown down the Gulf from Iraq, this dust. It's well-travelled dust, liberated dust. This is one of a number of stunning images of the storm from NASA's earth observatory.


It's brought the summer temperatures down by about 15-20 degrees, but we're living in a gloomy, overcast world that will have asthmatics grasping for the Ventolin. We had this last year, too, but nowhere near as bad. Usually, you get dust here when the 'Shamal' blows, the North wind. But this is no shamal, it's just a suspension.

I've never seen this before in 20 years of travelling around and living in this place. I don't know if anyone else remembers it.

Next thing we're all going to find out that it's rich in depleted uranium from US munitions deployed in Iraq. I know that's seeing the hole not the doughnut, but this is just the weather for that kind of thing, oppressive and gloomy.

Blogging about the weather... How low have I sunk, hmm?

Bing-a-Ling

Found a funny one on SiteMeter today.

If you search Bing for "fujairah car accident", as some poor searcher did today, you get referred to this image (among others), linking to this:


You also get a page of strange things including a picture of the crucifixion. Honestly, take a look here.

Google? You're safe, boys. You've nothing to worry about for a while yet... Yahoo? You got bilked, boys. Bilked!

BTW, this picture of a fake plastic chicken is a popular landing site on this blog as the marvels of SEO seem to indicate this is a particularly highly ranked fake plastic chicken picture. It was taken by pal CJ to demonstrate why he's a PR and not a photographer...

The Inshallah Bus

Image via Wikipedia

Sarah's christened it 'The Inshallah Bus' because it will come when it comes. There's no actual timetable as such. It just comes, Inshallah.

Sharjah's infamous No. 14 bus service (there is no 13, there is no 15) leaves from near McNabb Mansions on its meandering progress through Sharjah to the airport. On the plus side, it costs just Dhs3 to get to the airport. On the minus side, it takes over an hour to make its stately and undocumented way. You just find a bus stop that says 14 on it and wait for a bus to turn up. They leave the portakabin on the sand terminus on the Ajman border every 15 minutes from 05.30 or so, but when they actually get (or turn up) anywhere is pure guesswork.

I asked the nice man at the terminus for a timetable and he laughed delightedly. There is no timetable. I suppose at least you can't say the buses in Sharjah don't run on time.

It's an ill wind for the cabbies, though. Our regular cabbie, the lugubrious Mr. G., blames the Inshallah Bus for at least part of the recent alarming drop-off in customers. He's more and more dependent on his regulars to help him meet his harsh target of over Dhs250 per day in revenue now that many people take the bus instead. An express service that goes from the airport to Rolla Square and the Vegetable Market costs just Dhs5.

Having just come back from leave and injudiciously managed to misplace his mobile (and, therefore, a number of those regulars he needs so badly), Mr G. is having a tough time right now. He's our regular precisely because we trust him, like him and have his mobile number. I tip him a bit every trip and so we have a taxi on call. We'd use the call centre but of course there isn't one - there's no booking service at all for taxis in Sharjah.

Buses with no timetables and cabs with no booking system. Thank God at least some of the old, quixotic, unregulated pottiness of life in the Emirates remains.

No Dogs Please at Dubai Animal Beauty Pageant

Image via Wikipedia

Bloggers Seabee and Mai focus on the serious news on today's Gulf News front page, asserting (with no more detail than this) that expatriates returning to the UAE will have to produce a medical certificate certifying that they are free of H1N1 virus,both sending out a well deserved "Whaat?" In the direction of the story and, in Seabee's case, the sloppy reporting. The front page GN story was later debunked by The National's reporters and by WAM.

However, I was rather more taken with a lovely little nugget nestling snugly further in my 460grammes of papery daily fun and frolics.

The search is on for an AVA - an Ambassador with a Voice for Animals. Acronyms are so this year. We had Paris combing Dubai for a BFF - although I have to say, the search for an AVA actually left me more with a WTF?

Organisers are promising to seek women who have a genuine passion for animals and their welfare. The winner will get the chance to spend time at K Friends and Feline Friends (one can only assume it'll be the chance to muck out the kennels) and be expected to educate the public and spread awareness about how a pet needs to be looked after, according to GN.

This is all laudable enough, but rather had me wondering why the whole thing was illustrated by a bunch of birds on a stairway, decked out in high heels and LBDs. And then we get to the good bit. The competition will include a 'pageant'. Not, you can be sure, a 'Beauty Pageant' - because those are naughty and banned.

Oh no. Not that. This is a 'pageant'. The girls who have convinced judges that they are passionate about pooches and crazy about kitties will take part in the 'pageant' that will 'feature all the contestants parading first in t-shirts and shorts and then in an evening dress'.

Because, let's face it, having nice long legs and being righteously stacked are what animal welfare's all about, eh, girls? Let's have a nice smile for the cameras! Hands on hips and say Poneeee!

Muslim women, we can only assume, need not apply. Unless they're willing to dance around half-naked in public grinning at a panel of drooling 'judges' who'll be marking them on their 'presentation' and 'poise'...

Rather fittingly, the story goes on to confirm that one of the judges is also a leading judge at the world's leading dog show Crufts.

AVA? WTF?

Little Gem

Image via Wikipedia

You might have seen that a company is to turn a lock of Michael Jackson's burned hair, scooped up after the infamous Pepsi commercial accident, into a diamond.

If not, you can read the whole scoop here.

The website of LifeGem, the company proposing to undertake the transformation of a dead pop star's burned hair into a collection of valuable, limited edition diamonds (an undertaking that is, I am sure you will agree, in no way sick or macabre), is well worth a visit. It had me in helpless heaves for oxygen, blinded with tears and snivelling as if someone had tased me then hit me with a powerful dose of mace.

The homepage kicks off well:

The LifeGem^® is a certified, high-quality diamond created from the carbon of your loved one as a memorial to their unique life.

I was already giggling like an idiot at that. The carbon of your loved one. Nice. But it got better. A lot better. The FAQ had me hooting (instructions on how much of your loved one to send are included. In case you're interested, one cup of loved one should do it), particularly when they take great care instructing potential clients not to send all of their loved ones.

But LifeGem's Precious Pets service, here finished me off. I was down for the count, helpless and moaning in pain by this point.

Please go there. It will make your day and you will all love me more for having shared.

NufNuf

Image by S and C via Flickr

I was driving over the highlands north of Braemar. It was the first week in January and bitterly cold and wet, the biting rain whipping over the exposed bleakness just turning to freezing. I stopped for the two despondent-looking hitch-hikers huddled together on the side of the twisting highland road. They were rosy-faced with the cold and grateful for the lift as they bustled wetly into the car.

“Where are you going?” They asked me.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “I’m just following the computer.”

There was a sudden silence. I handed them the printout. They both held it, open-mouthed, alternately reading the list of instructions and looking up at me in case I had a knife or something.

“B-Braemar will be fine, if that’s okay?” The braver of the two said. But their expressions were clear – I might as well have announced I could see bats swooping out of the sky as I admired the shapes of their skulls with a twisted anthropologist’s drug-pumped intensity.

In 1988, you didn’t drive around the country cluelessly following a computer printout. Nobody had even heard of Autoroute, let alone Tom-Toms and SatNav. These are the perils of the early adopter. People think you’re a nutter all the time. I’ve learned my lessons the hard way – these days I let other mugs wrestle with the unusable geek-fodder at the bleeding edge of technology.

Last weekend, 21 years after Autoroute 1.0 (no printed maps back then – you got a screen map and a printout of directions) and Braemar, my mobile phone took us to Al Ain. Having just got a new N86 (following two perfectly happy years pooh-poohing early adoption freaks such as Gianni and CJ), I finally got a phone that does 3D mapping, SatNav and locational services thingies. It also does in-car FM music transmitting, Twittering, Facebooking and all the other things that we are told telephones should do nowadays. These things all being over and above the actual speaking to other humans stuff that appears to be going out of common practice with increasing rapidity.

The first thing that amazed me was the process of paying for the mapping application license. I bought a month’s trial, just for the hell of it (I’m like that, I can splurge Dhs32 with abandon – I’m such a mad, impetuous thing!) and the card transaction over the mobile was smooth and problem-free. In fact, I’d actually finished it before I realised this was the first time I’d actually paid real card-money for something over a mobile.

We set off for a happy afternoon’s following the directions of the slightly arch-sounding female voice emanating from my phone on the 180Km-odd hack to Al Ain from Northern Sharjah.

We christened her NufNuf. It’s a long story, but if the Brits have a Tom-Tom, we reckoned the Irish could have a Mick-Mick and therefore the UAE could have a NufNuf. NufNuf was the name of the West Highland terrier that Sheikha sent by private jet from London to distraught International School of Choueifat Sharjah Headmistress Dorothy 'Dotters' Miles after canine predecessor Kirsty was dimensionally transmogrified by a car driven by a careless parent. It’s been a long stint here in the UAE, I know...

NufNuf pin-pointed Jebel Hafeet on the map easily enough – so can I, by the way, but we wanted to see if she had a better route – and so we set off. On the way, we slipped in a sneaky detour to Sharjah post office, which rather led to a minor huff from NufNuf. “Recalculating Route”, she sniffed at us several times as we consistently ignored her advice to turn back in a number of increasingly desperate and highly ingenious ways.

Once out on the open highway and going in the prescribed direction, she calmed down a bit. It was clear that the maps she was using were good, but a little out of date. This shouldn’t be a major problem and you can appreciate that updating maps of Dubai would be enough to turn Magellan insane, but if people are going to go around selling maps of somewhere like the UAE, they need to take the hit and keep ‘em up to the minute.

The other surprise was that NufNuf was au fait with the applicable speed limits. This led to me getting told to ‘Observe the speed limit’, much to Sarah’s smug glee.

The acid test was Al Ain, though. Would NufNuf negotiate that confusing grid of tree-lined roads with their mad roundabouts and flowery decorations? I’ve always made my way around Al Ain with a rich mixture of luck and judgement in an 80/20 proportion – the similarity of many boulevards to each other, the frequent roundabouts and confusing signage make negotiating the charming desert oasis city of Al Ain, as a place you don’t visit often, a real nightmare.

NufNuf breezed it. A tendency to repeat the same instruction three times and more was forgiven when life got hectic and she picked a better route than the one I’ve always used (don’t ask me what my ‘traditional route’ is, it’s sort of 'pass Hili Fun City and continue down the roads that feel right'). She can be a bit literal – she wanted to take us on a road that wasn’t the one that leads up Jebel Hafeet, but that’s OK – she was headed for the mountain itself because I hadn’t bothered searching for the Mercure Hotel that’s actually up Jebel Hafeet. If you search for it, it's there.

I’d have liked the option to pick a location on the map rather than search for hotels and things, but maybe I just haven’t found it. What I did find was that my mobile acts as a perfectly serviceable and useful SatNav, that it doesn’t cost much to keep the maps up to date and that I’d use it for getting around relatively infrequently visited places like Al Ain and Abu Dhabi in future. I’ll be using it in the UK and Ireland this summer, too, you can bet your sweet bottom.

I also found out that the four-hour drive to Al Ain and back with NufNuf assisting (With a long phone call and some compulsive Tweeting, I admit!) will do for a battery: an in-car charger cable is a most desirable accessory.

Mind you, she did talk a lot, did NufNuf. Particularly about that speed limit business...