Spangles

Image by Johnny Grim via Flickr
The tradition of scattering little pieces of glass all over the roads during Ramadan sadly seems set to continue this year. Driving past a smashed car on the Deira side of Business Bay bridge this morning, the driver apparently alive but nursing a nasty nosebleed, I was only surprised that it was the first major accident I have actually witnessed in the first days of this long, hot fast. I know it won't be the last - in fact, three people have already died on Dubai's roads in the first three days of Ramadan.

This Ramadan is a trial indeed - the Fajr prayer which commences the fast takes place at around 4.30am and Maghrib, the prayer that marks Iftar, the breaking of the fast, takes place at around 6.50pm - so people are fasting for something a little over fourteen hours a day. The fast means that nothing may pass your lips, so we're talking no eating, drinking (no, not even water) or smoking. When the ambient temperature's creeping into the mid forties (that's 110F to Americans), fourteen hours is long, long time. And it's debilitating - as the days pass, the cumulative effect on people's systems is plain to see.

A road full of tired, distracted and physically weakened drivers means that everyone has a huge additional duty of care - not only those fasting, but those who are not but who could give their fellow drivers a little more leeway than usual.

Dubai's Road and Transport Authority has launched an awareness campaign designed to highlight the extra care that drivers should take in Ramadan, which appears to consist of some leaflets (according to this story in Gulf News) and using the traffic information system displays. The need for these huge and no doubt expensive displays have long mystified me, although I'm sure I'm alone in thinking of them as Mostly Pointless. Everyone else no doubt likes the occasional aphorism, national day greeting and, very occasionally, advice that the traffic is slow - usually the only entertainment while waiting in the tailback stretching under the sign.

Today's message reads, in English, "Take care of other's fault" - and yes, I am so small-minded as to complain about the illiterate rendering of the message. Whether you should be exhorted to take care of others' faults or looking to take more care yourself is also worthy of debate.

But a few leaflets and a wonky message are simply not enough. Between the tolls and fees it raises, the RTA must surely have the resources to launch a serious public awareness campaign that could at least have a chance of alleviating this awful and totally avoidable carnage.

One component of it could be a concerted effort to create a strong moral climate condemning the fools putting others' lives at risk when they dash carelessly home for Iftar, seemingly convinced for some reason that they are rendered temporarily immune from the consequences of their selfishness.

The UAE BlackBerry Ban: Barmy

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Why does all the fun happen when I'm away? Woke up today to the news that the UAE is to block BlackBerry Messenger, BlackBerry E-mail and BlackBerry web-browsing following a ruling by telecom regulator the TRA.

Gulf News online reports the story, which WAM broke today as far as I can see from over here. The National's story is here. Etisalat has made a statement which includes the immortal words, "BlackBerry data is immediately exported off-shore, where it is managed by a foreign, commercial organisation."

Oh, the LOLs, from a country where all requests to browse the web are immediately referenced to, errr, foreign, commercial organisations. Unless something's changed since the McAfee acquisition, US security company Secure Computing used to parse all searches to make sure that we weren't being exposed to all the naughtiness and stuff that's out there. We weren't so shy about 'foreign commercial organisations' then, were we folks?

BlackBerry customers were, infamously, not subject to the arbitrary restrictions of the block list. Many will remember the furore that erupted, extensively discussed on this very blog, which appeared to be a muckle-headed attempt on the part of the Telco That Likes To Say Ugh, Etisalat, to cludge security software intended for other purposes into an attempt to introduce surveillance and monitoring capabilities to the otherwise hard to intercept BB.


It's interesting for telecom regulation watchers that the customer is to be harmed extensively as a result of this move by a regulator, a class of organisation that is everywhere in the world tasked with holding the customers interests as one of its primary goals. The Telcos are being forced to breach their compact with their users (The vast majority of people bought BlackBerrys precisely with this very functionality as their primary reason for buying in) and tens of thousands of devices have been rendered basically unfit for purpose overnight.

I look forward to this move being 'clarified'. As it stands, it's yet another attempt to bomb ourselves back into the digital stone age. The madness of it all is that nothing has changed about the BlackBerry or the way in which the device works - and nothing has changed (correct me, please, if I'm wrong) in the 'moral and cultural' environment, or indeed the regulatory environment, since the BB was first introduced to the UAE - it has always worked using the company's own servers which underpinned the very services that CrackBerry users find so very appealing. If you can't live with it now - you shouldn't have sold it to us back then.

Will customers be offered refunds for the now barely functional hunks of black and chrome plastic they hold in their hands? Or will Etisalat and Du be offering free plastic covers that say 'I am browsing happily. Carry on as normal.'???

PS: In a move that appears to highlight that this move is being prompted by security concerns more than anything else, WAM has published an odd document that purports to 'compare the existing telecom regulations of the US, UK and UAE' but which is actually something of a 'dossier' that appears intended to justify the idea that a regulator can just turn around and delete a service being accessed by tens of thousands of consumers. It's a long read, but it's here.

Right. I'm going back on holiday...

Queen

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It was my parents' 60th wedding anniversary yesterday - the reason we went on leave unseasonably early was to attend. We had contacted the relevant types to arrange a message from the Queen, which you qualify for with a diamond wedding or by passing 100 years of age.

The process is remarkably analogue - there are no online forms or stuff, you give your details over the phone and then they arrange a search of the Register of Births, Weddings and Deaths, forward the data to the Palace, who send you a note confirming that yes, you do qualify for a message and also confirming the details.

Saturday morning the postman came with an extra duty - he has to announce that he has a message from the Palace (and, incidentally, the relevant Post Office has to confirm it will make delivery prior 9.30am on the day in question or an Inquiry would be mounted by the Palace. I kid you not.). Inside the blue covering envelope is a beige one with a crest printed across it. And inside that is a card with a photo of HM, together with a congratulatory message signed by Elizabeth R. And some gold tassels. The gold tassels are an important element. The back of the envelope, rather cutely, says 'If Undelivered, Return to Buckingham Palace'.

My mum was over the moon, dancing about all over the place and just generally as delighted as someone who has found a million pounds worth of Roman coins in their garden. Brenda was popped onto the centre of the fireplace - from where I have to tell you her eyes follow you around the room - and the story of the whole thing was generally dined out on over the subsequent festivities.

It's nice that something daft like that can make people so very happy. Nice one, Buck Palace!

Sweaty Sharjah

Image by jainaj via Flickr

According to the car (which knows these things), the temperature has been getting as high as 48C over the past couple of weeks. Gulf News tells us that the average noon temperature right now is 41C - and the humidity is knocking 70% at night. It's certainly hot, sticky and damp at the moment, as many of you will well know.

So the rolling power cuts that are currently sweeping across Sharjah are pretty unpopular. They come without warning, for anything up to eight hours at a time - GN reports some areas have been without power for 30 hour - and have affected many built-up housing areas in the emirate, as well as its industrial zone.

The government body responsible for the whole mess, the Sharjah Electricity and Water Authority (SEWA), has remained regally silent, refusing to answer journalist's questions. As I pointed out on the Dubai Today radio programme yesterday, this is hardly surprising. It's difficult to raise more than a simian grunting noise out of them as a customer, let alone a cogent response to media enquiries.

This, of course, has got the media's goat, particularly Gulf News which has reported the whole fiasco extensively today, giving a nice chunk of front page as well as all of page three to reporting on residents' misery - and there's plenty of it to report on, I can tell you. People are having to drive around in their cars at night to keep their kids cool, workers are being forced to sleep outside and a wide range of businesses are fighting to keep going in the face of the highly unpredictable outages.

It just goes to show, hell hath no fury like a journalist scorned. Except the force of that fury is tempered with a good deal of timorousness. Gulf News' swingeing attack on the ever-silent SEWA in its editorial reads more like a schoolgirl's essay than it does a righteous polemic. The last line of this towering tirade sums up the fury that GN brings to excoriate the opaque authors of Sharjah's power vacuum: "Children are among the first to be distressed thanks to the excessive heat."


Mind you, at least Gulf News is trying - it's not alone, either. 7Days and Khaleej Times both have extensive coverage (KT pointing out that a worker has died of heatstroke and 30 others have been admittted to hospital in the midst of the cuts).

Sharjah's very own Gulf Today, as pointless a newspaper as you're likely to find, totally ignores the entire issue in what can only be described as a craven display.  Mind you, it neatly demonstrates rule one of journalism in the UAE. If you're going to make a mess, do it next door or mummy will be upset.

Can't Write, Won't Write

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It's official. I can't even look at the damn' book. I've tried, tried to work on edits, to hone the synopsis, to dive in and really get to grips with those all-important goings-over, tightening this scene, fleshing out that character and doing all the tidying up you need to do with a newly-written first draft of a book.

It's a bit like finishing off a building - snagging, getting the protective gypsum off the floors, tidying away all the rubbish and maybe tweaking the plumbing a bit so that hot water actually comes out of the hot taps before getting outside and working on the landscaping and other stuff that makes a house a home - including moving in the furniture.

Except I can't face it. I'm sick of it, of the sight of it. I don't care. The characters suck, the plot bores me. The whole thing is a cobbled-together mess. I can't bear to look at it.

I think I have post-literary depression.

Brits

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It's getting hard to move around the city these days without tripping over homeless Brits sleeping on the streets. With some of the world's best journalists on the case, ranging from the brilliant mind that is Johann Hari to the mighty BBC, everyone's been buying, seemingly unquestioningly, into a homeless Brit sleeping on the street in recession-hit Dubai story.

This one, the fifth most viewed video on the Beeb's site at the time of writing, tends to ring oddly when struck lightly with the hammer of credulity.

Now don't get me wrong. Dubai, the UAE, can be a hard place to find yourself in financial trouble. The place has always been uncompromising about debt - and has always implemented a strict policy regarding cheques which has been basically a two-strike deal: you bounce two cheques and banking facilities are withdrawn from you. And when you ever bounce one, the person you bounced it on has the right to go to the police who will treat it as a criminal case.

This has always been the fact - certainly over the time I have lived here.

You'd have to have some sympathy with a system that governs a 90% expatriate population requiring that someone remain in the country until their debts here are duly settled. Without clear extradition treaties and an effective system of managing international debtors, you'd have to manage the problem locally. And that means requiring someone to stay in the country until their debt is managed.

A lot of people got caught by the downturn and the subsequent wave of redundancies and there is no doubt at all that many suffered unexpected hardship - and that many also fled the country rather than face the unpleasant consequences of default. You can't deny that - and we're still seeing a number of people leaving here as well as a constant slew of abandoned vehicles - to the point where workers cut the tarmac out around this pair while digging up a car park!

But with families at home as well as friends, colleagues and a number of philanthropically-minded activists working to help labourers and others here (incidentally, didn't hear the BBC talking to any desperate labourers, did you?), nobody, surely, has to sleep on the street. You'll find less people sleeping on the street in the UAE than you will in Watford.

At the same time, anyone taking on significant debt here knows the law and the way in which it is applied - and if they don't I'd be amazed at their naiveté. I'm not saying the way in which debt is handled here is necessarily right - but that it is fact. You want to live and work out here? It's the deal you took on when you came out.

I think our media is all too willing to buy the debt-hit Brit sleeps in the street angle - and that this story deserved more scrutiny before it ran.

Potty

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This morning I underwent the annual ritual, The Attestation of the Tenancy Contract. I have never found it so straightforward, but then I've had a decade and a half to get my act together and prepare for the process. The annual Hunting For Every Possible Document You Might Ever Need ritual having been carried out, I'm good to go down to the government office at the Sharjah Vegetable Market.

The Attestation of the Tenancy Contract ritual is characterised by two things. One is that the rules change quite frequently. The second is that whatever documents you amass, you'll always find one that you hadn't expected or known was required, resulting in a disappointed drive home to regroup for another try.

The office that deals with such things has been transformed in recent years and is now a smart, marble-floored, airconditioned building with comfortable seats and a ticketed waiting system. We are now 'customers'. The surly looking bloke at the Information Desk scanned my wodge of Every Possible Document You Might Ever Need and looked momentarily disheartened. My heart raced. Had I done it? Had I finally beaten the system?

"Landlord passport copy."

This was awful. I had an attested copy of our marriage certificate, both passport copies, last year's contract, the landlord's ownership paper, our electricity bill and a photocopy of the page in the Domesday book that mentions my family. They'd never asked for the landlord's passport copy before.

And then I realised. He was just pissed because I had every document under the sun. I looked him straight in the eye. "I don't have it."

He grunted and gave me a ticket. I couldn't believe it - I was right! And I was through! Home free! I nearly danced to the girl behind the counter when my number was called. Which is when I found out that Sarah's passport copy included her old visa and we needed her new visa. Luckily I could get it faxed over and so my documents were duly scanned into the system, a considerable amount of money jemmied out of my wallet and our tenancy duly recognised in the eyes of the law. I do like the way that a sum charged by a government based on a percentage of a transaction is referred to as a fee here - presumably so we can remain 'tax free'...

Of course, the potty thing about the whole rigmarole is that it is all completely unnecessary. The majority of these documents were issued by the government in the first place and are certainly held on multiple government systems. The most basic integration of such systems would allow databases to cross-relate each document. Even in an environment where this were not possible (for instance, because of the complete lack of integration of any government system despite years of biffling on about e-government but little actually doing anything meaningful about it), you could save an awful lot of hassle by allowing people to scan the documents and send 'em over along with payment on Visa. It wouldn't be a complicated job. It's the sort of thing the Internet has turned out to be quite good at doing...


But then I'm running before I walk again. At least we've moved forward to a single point of transaction - there used to be twelve separate, discrete steps to renewing a tenancy contract, many of which consisted of removing the staple, shuffling the papers and then restapling them. Each of those steps used to involve long queues and shuffling, jostling crowds.

And at least now we're 'customers'. Whatever that means.

Pumped

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The rise in petrol prices that came into force at midnight last night means that my Pajero now costs Dhs100 to fill up. Two years ago, it cost Dhs70.

Given the fact that we still pay roughly per gallon what the UK consumer pays per litre, I can tell that any outbreak of sympathy for those affected is going to be very localised and immeasurably brief. But the move meant that the queue at my local ADNOC station last night backed up into the street, the usual amount of chaos and mayhem resulting.

Having lived through the days of petrol rationing in the UK during the 1970s, I was struck by the irony of queues in the 'Arab Street' as people tried to fill up with cheap petrol before the rise came into force. I can remember as a kid when petrol prices shot up to, gasp, over a pound per gallon. My dad used to drive around for miles trying to find cheaper petrol from garages that were still supplying at the old price. I'd point out to him that he'd burn any savings in the petrol he was using to try and find the lower prices.


I'm going on leave soon. One of my small and wicked little pleasures when going on leave is to strike up conversations with London cabbies about the price of petrol in the UAE. They really don't like it. This time I've got the ideal excuse, too: I can complain about the huge price rises and wait for them to sympathetically ask how much I have to pay for petrol before I tell them that we're getting gouged for something like 30p per litre.

It's an ill wind that blows no good...

Social Media Tart

Image by HubSpot via Flickr

I've been doing quite a lot of speaking at 'online' conference events and workshops recently (this will surprise nobody who knows me) and consequently meeting a lot of people who are experimenting with social media within their organisations. It's something of a growing trend - typically, one person within an organisation has been using Facebook or Twitter, even blogging, and has come to realise that there is very real value to the organisation in 'being there'. A lot of these people come from the communications department, although by no means all. At a recent event where I spoke to an audience of event managers, I found quite a lot of people who had responsibility for companies' events were the drivers behind introducing social media to their organisations.

Something of a pattern has started to emerge. The enthusiast is given permission to open up a social media account because it seems harmless enough - the company's management doesn't 'get' social media and so doesn't see any danger in letting the enthusiast play with it. The enthusiast starts out and quickly finds a ready audience of people responding, interacting and demanding information, access and insight. It all becomes hard to handle precisely because it has been successful - one person can't keep up with the volume but has gained enough experience to see the potential for this new medium.

So they go back to their management and point out that the experiment has been a great success, customers are now talking to the company over this new medium and appreciating the new degrees of access it brings. Can we expend the programme now?

And many I talk to are right in the middle of that conversation, mired in 'not just yet, there's a recession on you know' and 'What's the ROI?' reactions from the management team that has allowed this thing to develop so far precisely because it has ascribed it no importance.

Because we're hearing so much of this one problem, it's going to be one of the aspects of social media in the region that we're going to try and address at the Middle East Public Relations Association (MEPRA) workshop being held at the Emirates Academy in Dubai tomorrow. Dubbed 'Get Real About Social Media', the workshop's a three-hour session intended to provide some ideas, insight, assistance and feedback of a realistic nature (not three hours of 'join the conversation' schtick). I'm going to be co-presenting along with the delightful Samantha Dancy, the corporate communications manager of Jumeirah Group, who'll be bringing the benefit of her experience exploring social media from the client side. I'll be doing the usual gibbering and speaking in tongues.

You can get more information right here. The workshop's open to non-members, so you can always just pitch up and heckle.

Taxi

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Regular cabbie Mr. G unable to take the booking, I was reduced to pot luck on the roadside. Unusually fragrant, today's surly gentleman wanted to know if I 'mallum' our destination. I've been here before and so asked him how long he had been a resident of this fair land.

"This my first day."

Oh joy, deep and frabjous. Off we went on our merry way and I discovered, by that strange form of linguistic osmosis that allows us to communicate, that our man is called Iqbal and he hails from Peshawar. He is highly amused that I am called Al Iskandar and that no, I don't speak Peshwari. I don't go around toting an AK47 and growing opium either, but I thought it best not to let him know that in case he thought I was soft.

We proceeded unusually slowly, it has to be said. My experience of gentlemen from Peshawar in the past has been a series of breakneck rides at intolerable speeds. I have always wondered if this is from experience dodging the bullets and IEDs of the mountainous Afghani border-lands. But Iqbal was a man who believed in not only driving within the 20kmh 'grace zone' but actually below the speed limit.

After a while I could stand it no more. It was like someone reading their powerpoint, a terrible slow-motion replay of obviousness stretched out to an unbearably tedious timeline. We were on the Etihad road from Sharjah to Dubai when I cracked.

"Mr Iqbal, you can go up to 120km on this road."
"Not good."
"Really? What is problem?"
"Brakes problem."


Mr Iqbal had obviously been a victim of 'give the crap car to Nobby Newbloke' and I felt for him. But my sympathy was nowhere near as intense as my relief when we finally freewheeled up to our destination.