Chaos Theory

Image by Ingy The Wingy via FlickrThe chaos in Europe's skies is continuing quite nicely, with irate passengers all asking the same question we asked under the ash cloud: why on earth aren't the airlines communicating with us? All we want is information and perhaps even access to rebooking facilities.

Having given up on Virgin Atlantic, whose failure to communicate extended to a Twitter account that tells you it can't do anything and directs you back to the call centre (and a GSA in Dubai that is as much use as a chocolate welding mask), we rebooked the inlaws onto Etihad (at almost twice the price, I have to say. Airlines, slow to help passengers rebook or endorse their tickets to another airline were nevertheless quick enough to ramp up their pre-Chrismas rates). The flight left just in time to be under the snow as it wended its merry way West from shamed Heathrow. They travelled to the airport down motoroways whitened with packed snow, getting to Dublin in perfect time to watch the airport close.

However, Etihad's handling of the situation was entirely a different story. They were met by meal vouches and, shortly after, a no-nonsense staffer who told them precisely what was going to happen. They were bussed to a hotel and put up awaiting the departure of the flight this morning following Dublin re-opening at 8am.

That's all it take, folks. A little respect for the customer and a little sensible decision making and communication. We all understand flights are delayed and cancelled - what's making everyone so riled up is being treated like mushrooms.

It seems to me that airlines can do some very simple things to ameliorate this type of incident:

1) Cut websites over to dedicated informational sites right away.

2) Suspend new ticket sales immediately, at least for the immediate future (say, 5 days).

3) Operate sensible Twitter accounts (Twitter has really come into its own through this whole incident, most major airports have accounts and airlines have started directing customers to Twitter too. As a real-time informational tool, it can hardly be bettered. But it's a TWO way street, people).

4) Open up rebooking facilities online to passengers. Build a rules based system for rebooking and, where necessary, endorsing tickets across to other airlines. This facility could be built on a 'dark site' basis, and brought into play only when there is major disruption. If your call centre people can deal with this screens, I think we can - don't you?

5) Now you've got the majority of people off your call centre's backs, you can dedicate it to handling the exceptional requirements of people in trouble, not just the everyday business of rebooking and finding out what's going on.

It seems so simple to me. Am I missing something? Or are the airlines?

Anyway, with the (fingers crossed) anticipated arrival of our belated guests and a million things to do before Christmas, it might go a little quiet around here so you'll just have to amuse yourselves...

Snow Joke

Image by nickwheeleroz via FlickrHaving been caught out by that Icelandic volcano thing in the summer (Tikkipikkapukka or whatever it's called), I thought that European airports and  airlines would at least have benefited from the very real learnings of the communications disaster surrounding the eruption disruption. Reviewing the way their communications, call centre and media teams performed, airlines must surely have concluded they had a massive customer service disaster on their hands and, in fact, were lucky not to have been called to give answer of themselves in the circumstances. So when this disruption hit, they'd be better prepared...

More fool me.

It's chaos out there today. With the in-laws and baby girl due out here tomorrow, we've spent a good hunk of today trying to work out what on earth's going on - and trying to find anyone who'll speak or in any other way be of any assistance whatsoever.

The biggest lesson, for me, from Eyeapickledpickle was that airlines had to have better contingency plans for large scale disruption - that information flow is an absolute must - the tools available to us today, specifically online, mean that one to one and one to many communication can be supported with interactivity, intelligence and information flow - all you have to do is respect your customers enough to enable it. Twitter was invaluable during the whole Eyjafjallajökull incident - accounts like @eurocontrol (European ATC) kept the information flowing from the horse's mouth. But it wouldn't be difficult to build re-booking tools, better online enquiry and requesting tools and even better 'dark sites' - websites set up to kick in right when trouble looms and provide instant information and responses. Virgin's site wasn't bad today, but its call centre was utterly inadequate to the task. It's not as if they couldn't have seen trouble coming, either. There were forecasts, people. As for Aer Lingus, words fail me.


It seems a little mad to have people looking at screens on the 'phone talking to customers when those customers could be looking at those screens themselves. Many of the world's airlines have shown us that the customer can actually be trusted (monkeys though they are) to actually make a booking by themselves (something that travel agents traditionally believed us to be incapable of), so why not let us make re-bookings or endorse tickets for cancelled flights onto alternative carriers?


But then again, maybe we'll just opt for ignoring them all, putting up some sympathy-inducing text on the 'dark' site about how hard it is for call centre staff to get into work in this weather (not that we had a plan or anything, you understand) and just hope the negative feedback blows over in a while.

There has to be a better way - and there is. The Internet. WE could do the work that the call centre guys are doing. Why do we still have to endure  the bottleneck?

The Emirates National Identity Card. A fiasco.

Image by dawn m. armfield via FlickrI've been moaning about the Emirates National Identity Card fiasco since early in  November 2008 - and I have by no means been alone - many august online voices (including SeaBee and Monsignor Goat) have been reeling around in awe at the ever changing cycles of misinformation that have clouded every aspect of the rollout of the UAE's national ID card scheme.

I suspect many of us viewed yesterday's pronouncements similarly - in fact, I voiced my glee on the Dubai Today show yesterday when I prophesied a round of the clarifications that SeaBee loves so well. Quite what has to be clarified isn't yet clear, because the lack of clarity in the things to be clarified is obscuring quite what could be clearer.

UAE newspaper 7Days, which has slowly but surely been regaining its tabloid swagger following the concerted campaign to eradicate it a while ago, today does what no other newspaper has dared to do. It listened to reader complaints and decided to actually investigate how people are meant to be making an application for a national ID card before the supposed December 31st deadline. Yes, you can pick yourself up from the floor now. It did journalism.

What was the result? The paper's Nichola Jones called all of the 30 typing centres listed on the EIDA website in Dubai to find out if she could start the application process. Only nine of these were working numbers - and of these, only three answered and only one actually confirmed they were accepting applications. None of the typing centres in Abu Dhabi answered the phone. This is perhaps understandable - one of the Dubai typing centres had explained to the paper they weren't taking applications as they were working through a backlog of over 1,000 forms.

Ten calls to the EIDA 'emergency hotline' weren't answered, confirming what the paper had heard from readers - it's chaos out there. Here's Nichola's story, Identity Crisis On The Cards?

Vague threats are being bandied about regarding fines - enough to prompt colleagues yesterday to start talking about applying for the card (I've had one since September 2009, although have not once managed to use it for anything useful like, for instance, identifying myself) and I told them to do what I did - download the amusingly titled application application. (You may recall, the application application was a PC application that let you fill out an application so that you can apply for an appointment to make an application. The application application didn't let you make an appointment for an application: you still had to apply for an application appointment even if you had an application filled using the application application.).

Except you can't. There is no longer an application application. It has expired.So you can only go to one of these mythical typing centres. It's worth noting that 7Days doesn't actually tell us which typing centre was open, contactable and claiming to be able to process applications. That'll be because the 7Days team are all down there today.

So what happens on the 31st December? Are people without an ID card application registered going to blow up? We can only wait for some clarification.

With all my twenty four years' in Middle East media and communications, I can tell you that in my professional opinion the introduction of the national ID card system in the UAE has been a case study in botched and muddled communications that has confused, and quite possibly squandered, millions. Some of the amazing backstory is in these posts from the past.


I am only amazed that over two years later, it is still going on.

(And now, with thanks to Mita, The Inevitable Clarification)

Joke

Image via WikipediaWhen was the last time you were told a joke? Ages ago, right? You get texted jokes or emailed jokes, but we seem to have given up actually telling them.

And even when someone tells you a joke, it usually comes in the form, "Someone mailed me this great joke the other day. There's a bishop, an actress and two watermelons, right?"

The other thing is people forward really, really bad jokes with an invariable, "I never usually forward these things, but..."

Which is precisely what I'm doing now. I'm forwarding a joke I got by email (from pal Derek as it 'appens). but it did make me laugh:

Michael O’Leary, Chief Executive of 'Ryanair', walks into a busy Dublin pub. "I'll have a pint o' Guinness," he tells the barman.
"Sure," says the barman. "That'll be a Euro."
O'Leary can't believe it. "Christ almighty, but that'll explain how busy this place is! A Euro for a pint!"
He hands over the Euro with glee. The barman waits.
"What?" says O'Leary.
"Will ye be wantin' a glass wit dat?"

The Joy of Editing

Image via WikipediaI have taken against a number of words and phrases as a consequence of my nasty writing habit. Some of these are insidious little things that creep into manuscripts like cockroaches, infesting decent prose with their chitinous scuttling.

It's odd, but the vast majority of sentences containing the word 'that', for instance, are improved by its removal. I have started taking against that in a mildly unreasoning way, even attacking unsuspecting thats as I walk down the street. (Have you ever walked into a grocer and complained about his apostrophes? No, me neither, but I have oft been sore tempted, I can tell you. Avocadoe's my arse!)

I have just purged a manuscript of the word 'before', which is almost always a symptom of lazy writing. Excising before almost always leads to better sentence structure or to forcing you to rewrite the sentence more elegantly.

He stood before walking quickly out of the room.

Not only includes a before, it also contains two other weasel words - stood and walking. We 'stand' so rarely and standing is such a passive thing to do. Stood goes 90% of the time to be replaced by a more active occupation or, ideally, no explanation of the movement - we can infer it. Similarly 'walking'. We run, jump, dash, fly, leap and race. Why bother walking? It's so humdrum.

Put and putting are also very passive ways to describe an action which can often either go (giving way to inference) or be replaced with a more active description. We rarely put things down - we drop them, bang them, toss them or perhaps even gently place them.

And then there's 'and then', which I recognise is a nasty little habit I have to consciously sweep up after. It's always redundant. Friends have other habits like 'just' - and 'started to' is an indication that you can usually lose the action altogether. Things starting to happen rarely interest us - it's the happening that engages.

Any contributions to my list of words up with which I shall not put are more than welcome!

Sorry for the writing post. Normal service resumed shortly...

Oh Noes, My Shiny!

"Hi. I've come to collect my Shiny."
"Ah yes, it's you. Come in. Sit down. Tea? Coffee?"
"Neither thanks. Just my Shiny."
"Sure, sure, no problem. Just give me a second to get organised here. You sure you wouldn't like a drink? Mirinda? Teem?"
"No. No drinks thanks. Just my Shiny."
"Ahahahaa. Yes. Right. One tick then. Judith? Judith? Oh, where has that blasted girl gone. Here. Try one of these."
"What are they?"
"Dates. Traditional welcome from the mystical orient. I've got some ghawa around here somewhere. Just so that you can taste a little Arab hospitality."
"Look, I don't mean to be rude, but I don't want tea or coffee, Mirinda or Teem, dates or khawa. I just want my Shiny."
"Yes, yes, I know. Everyone gets so excitable about these things. I don't know. Ah! Here she is! And there you are!"
"Thank you, what's this?"
"Why, it's a nmkl pjkl ftmch of course!"
"But I don't want a nmkl pjkl ftmch. I want my shiny."
"That is your shiny. It looks like a shiny, feels like a shiny doesn't it?"
"Well, no. It looks like a nmkl pjkl ftmch. And feels like one. It's not as shiny. And why is there a string attached to it?"
"So we can stay attached to it. We'll take it back if you try and alter it or do anything with it we don't like. that's the big difference between shinies and nmkl pjkl ftmchs, really."
"But I bought a bloody Shiny from you, a proper shiny Shiny with 'Dare to dream' and 'Live to love in a graceful fairytale' and 'Your desert paradise comes to life' plastered all over it."
"It's the same thing, stop being so obdurate. It's no different."
"Except it's called a nmkl pjkl ftmch and it's got strings attached to it."
"Stop complaining."
"I will not stop complaining. I bought a Shiny from you, where is it?"
"I don't think you're making things any better for yourself you know. You'll be running out of time soon."
"Out of time?"
"Yes, you can only stay here two minutes at a time. After that we have to jab you with needles and take money from you."
"But I bought a Shiny!"
"No you didn't, you bought a nmkl pjkl ftmch. And if you don't like it..."
Omnes: "You can always leave!"

(If you want more Shiny dialogues, they're here and here and even here.)

Meh

Image via WikipediaSome days you just take a look around you and throw up your hands.

Electricity and water charges in Dubai are going up by 15%, a rise that applies to expatriates only.

New labour card fees are to be announced soon, we're told - hot on the heels of the news that labour cards are to be renewed on a two year cycle rather than the current three year cycle. And somehow I don't think they're going to be talking about cutting the cost of the cards to reflect their 33% reduction in validity.

A top Dubai police official is calling for a ban on parades following the chaos (or fun, depends on how you look at it) of National Day - Abu Dhabi police have confirmed a whopping tally of 25,000 bookings and 300 accidents around National Day. HSBC have a confusing and irritating new phone banking service that depends on you using the telephone they have registered for you.

Adding to that lot, we have finally had it confirmed that, in the UAE at least, 'freehold' actually means 'usufruct'. What the hell is 'usufruct'? It's "...the legal right to use and derive profit or benefit from property that belongs to another person, as long as the property is not damaged." Seriously.

I don't know where to start...

UAE Residency Visa Validity Cut

Image via WikipediaGulf News and The National today both report on a new move to cut labour card validity to two years instead of three. This means that residency visas will also now only be valid for two years.

Quite apart from allowing us to look forward to a more frequent bruise on the inside of our right arms along with the attendant paperwork, the move will obviously mean shelling out for a visa, labour card and health card more often. Rather brilliantly, Gulf News attempts to quote the rather confusing story filed by the Emirates' national news agency WAM where it appears to assert that the move will save everyone money. That WAM story appears to have been filed in Arabic only, BTW - I couldn't find hide nor hair of it in English.

According to GN's piece, 70% of all labour cards are cancelled before two years have passed, so reducing their term to two years will save UAE industry Dhs678 million. Apparently total license and work permit fees for 2009 were Dhs2.25 billion.

Let us not dwell churlishly on the fact that 2009 had to have been a record year for cancelled visas because of the good old downturn and the enormous outflux of labourers, let alone all those estate agents, from Dubai and the Northern Emirates. Oh no.


A short time spent trawling the General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners website for information on the cost of visa paperwork (also called DNRD, the Dubai Naturalisation and Residency Department. You'd think they'd make up their minds, wouldn't you?) not only yields some interesting tips on building websites and a peek into some fascinating minds, but also tends to result in returning 'Under Construction' whenever you approach anything that might look like being useful information. Thank goodness for e-government.

However, DubaiFAQs estimates the cost of a visa and the slew of papers, permits and cards that goes with it to be as much as Dhs6,000. If we decrease the validiy of visas by one third (3 years to 2 years), we can perhaps assume that visas will effectively cost us 33% more rather than 70% less. Not only does that cost us more money, it means residence visa revenues would increase to a handy 3 billion dirhams at the, presumably unusually low, 2009 rate.

The move will also result in enhancing 'competitiveness and movement in the job market', GN quotes a Labour Ministry official as saying.

It might well do for all I know. But all I can see is that nasty, dehumanising shuffle around the Satwa clinic and that brutal little needle moment looming closer on the horizon.

Why The UAE Skype Block Is Pointless

Image via WikipediaThe next move in the transformation of the telecommunications industry would appear to be afoot - Skype's off to the cloud (see this piece from TechCrunch). As eny fule no, Skype is currently blocked by the UAE's telcos as it doesn't hold an operating license in the country.

It's already starting to seem a little quaint and old fashioned, this idea of issuing operating licenses to offer telephony services. It reminds me a tad of the good old days when I first arrived in the UAE to start a new business publishing magazines. I quickly fell foul of the Ministry of Information and during the rather painful interview with the Man From The Ministry, it became clear that he was a tad confused about where my 'publishing house' was. It was in the boot of my car, in the shape of a PC. Having been an 'early adopter' of desktop publishing in the UK, I didn't need compositors, Linotronics, make-up artists, illustrators, designers, photo-editors and teams of writers.

Similarly, you don't need massive buildings housing ranks of switches to sustain pay-per-minute circuit-switched telephony any more. The cost of the infrastructure required to support communication has plummeted and operators are springing up using low-cost wireless technologies rather than all that expensive last-mile copper and fibre. At the same time, IP telephony means that we can use the robust and high speed infrastructure of the Internet to support both voice and video calling. Increasingly number-independent with our online social identities, we can access each other freely now without having to pay dollars per minute for that access - or possibly without even having to know who's providing us with that access. Apple, for instance, has been investigating the rather marvellous idea of the 'simless mobile', which would make Apple your telco, not the telco whose network you're roaming on. Not surprisingly, Europe's telcos have reacted with alarm at that one.

With Google and Microsoft both offering video calling integrated into their core platforms, as I've pointed out before, it's pretty hard to actually block these sites the way Etisalat and Du both block Skype. But if Skype moves onto the cloud, it'll be integrating with other platforms - TechCrunch, for instance, mentions LinkedIn but FaceBook has to be a top contender for Skypegration. However things develop, it rather looks as if blocking Skype will soon be No Longer An Option, because it'll be like grains of sand flowing around a jar of marbles.

The question is how much longer the UAE's operators will be snugly nestled in the cosy protectionism currently afforded them by the TRA. Because that protectionism is staving off the inevitable - and the inevitable, when it comes, may well do so with astounding speed.

Ye can't block innovation.

Kulluna Khalifa

I wandered down to the Sharjah Corniche this evening and spent twenty minutes snapping away at the procession of madly decorated cars, getting sprayed with silly string, beeped at, waved at and generally enjoying the atmosphere of celebration and delighted joy that swept everyone, even the poor expats caught in the huge end-to-end motorcade. It was the kind of buzz you'd only get from going to a big footie match or a Formula One race, everyone united in celebration and being jolly nice to everyone else. For a people normally so reserved and private, this public demonstration is always a remarkable reminder that national identity is utterly critical to the people of the UAE.

'Kulluna Khalifa' (as I explained yesterday, it means 'We are all Khalifa' in reference to HH Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed, the ruler of Abu Dhabi and the President of the UAE) was the motto of this year's celebrations, although 'Kulluna Blissed Out and Only Delighted' would have been closer to the mark.

Bring together hyper-nationalism, a reason to get together and be joyful and ubiquitous car culture and the result is remarkable. Shots I didn't get included the guy who had totally painted his car in poster paint, the guy who had 100% covered his car in UAE flag coloured feather boas and the car of grinning youths who'd painted their faces in the flag (the light was bad by then and my snap of them was blurred, dammit). The police were also in evidence, appearing to be nicking those who had flouted the 'keep your back windscreen clear' rule.

All in all good, harmless fun and quite, quite silly.