Re-intermediation

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I often speak at conferences, workshops and things and rarely miss the opportunity to laud Emirates Airline, typically using it as an example of advocacy (the fourth step in communication, wake up at the back). I advocate Emirates passionately - it has long been my airline of strong preference.

Perhaps interestingly, EK has my loyalty despite its customer loyalty scheme, Skywards, rather than because of it. For some reason Skywards always manages to make me feel like a beggar. I will never forget my first attempt to redeem airmiles, which resulted in me being thrown out of the business class queue at QAIA in Jordan and told to queue in economy (the upgrade they had confirmed to me wasn't on the system), turning to find one of my clients standing behind me and witness to my seeming pathetic attempt to scab an upgrade I wasn't entitled to. And I will never forgive them for the fact that we should have been checking into Emirates' rather lavish and wonderful Al Maha desert resort this afternoon for Sarah's birthday, but will be going out to dinner instead.

Skywards ticks all the right boxes - it's got a funky website, has lots of 'rewards' and is pleasingly automated - to the point where it's not really a hassle and can even provide the occasional pleasant surprise.Similarly, it can also let you down totally and really screw things up. The latter is a shame, but it's made even worse by the high levels of automation that Skywards employs. When the going gets tough, you get re-intermediated.

I have often wittered on about dis-intermediation, the phenomenon whereby technology removes the middle man and gives us direct access to the stuff we want. It's something I have come to think of as an empowering process - I can research and book my own holiday online, for instance, rather than depending on a travel agent. Similarly, you can buy music online rather than have to go to a shop and buy a CD.

Dis-intermediation is not only empowering for the end user, it also cuts out 'gatekeepers' - the people who sit in the middle and make choices for us - it's the threat hanging over the heads of record companies, publishers and newspaper proprietors. The democratisation of consumer choice, Internet advocates will queue up to tell you, is a positive benefit of technology.

But technology has introduced a new class of intermediary: the call centre. The thinking goes something like this: "Our staff are beings of pure energy who have jobs to do and can't be constantly interrupted by base, carbon based life-forms. Let's outsource talking to our customers and then our people can get on with doing useful things that make us money."

This is why you can't actually speak to anyone who works in your bank's branch anymore, why a call to your London telco routes you to Bangalore and why someone sitting in front of a terminal in Cairo is looking through your credit card statement 'to try and help you resolve this, sir'. These are the re-intermediators, the new middlemen.

So when Skywards fails to make the booking at its Al Maha Desert Resort and Spa despite the failure being clearly and wholly on their part, the people responsible for the booking suddenly fail to respond to emails. Your only recourse is to the call centre, which is staffed by people that can't actually do anything, they can only route requests over the system. They can tell you that they're sorry (how awful, to have to be constantly sorry for others' mistakes) but they can't actually let you talk to anyone responsible. They're the new front line troops, the poor saps that have to sit in a soulless room filled with other operators, being abused by irate people while the incompetent buffoons who are screwing things up never even hear the howls of agony from frustrated, unhappy customers and obviously feel completely free to totally ignore any other form of communication.

The technology that is empowering us is also disempowering us, taking away our choices and our right to expect people executing transactions on our behalf to respond to us and for them to take some sort of responsibility for their actions. And while automating customer service is no bad thing 98% of the time, there surely has to be a better way of dealing with the 2% of instances where rote, scripts and process will not do the job. It's one of the reasons why companies using Twitter as a customer service tool are finding they are met with an initial wave of frustrated customers and then a collective sigh of relief followed by cheering. We just need someone to take some sort of responsibility and fix the mess that's making us unhappy.

We're all missing a human to talk to.

Hiked

Image by Qiao-Da-Ye賽門譙大爺 via Flickr
Sharjah taxi fares are on the rise again - today's papers  carry the joyous news that a minimum fare of Dhs10 will now apply for any taxi journey and that the tariff will increase from Dhs1 per 650 metres to Dhs1 per 620 metres. The reason is, apparently, the franchise companies (who always seem to get cited when the fares are raised rather than Sharjah Transport, the body that is responsible for deciding the hikes).

The Dhs10 minimum charge has been in place in Dubai for some time, but it does seem a tad odd that in Sharjah we are now going to pay a minimum of Dhs10 for any journey when, back in the good old days of yore, private taxis were regulated to having to accept Dhs5 for any journey within the emirate. Ah, the good old days of yore, eh?

Sharjah Transport told Gulf News and others that the rises in the petrol price were to blame, which isn't unreasonable given that fuel prices have gone up by something like 25% this year (based on my Dhs80 going up to Dhs100 to fill up da Paj at ADNOC). However, this is the second price hike this year, the tariff used to be Dhs1 per 800 metres - and with drivers' fuel expenditures and empty/fare ratio carefully capped and monitored by the franchise companies, the new price rises should more than offset any fuel price rises.

Interesting, perhaps, that the anecdotal evidence of regular cabbie Mr G is that it's the bus services that are hurting more than the fuel price hikes. With the merry little yellow Brazilian 'Busscar' buses steadily plying their routes all over Sharjah for no more than a handful of coins, many people have been opting for public transport. With these rises, you could only draw the conclusion that more will join them and the drivers are going to get squeezed even harder.

I can't see the normally somewhat lugubrious Mr G being too happy about this one...

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...