Karama Karma

Image via WikipediaHaving visitors over for the festive season meant an inevitable trip to Dubai's Karama district which, together with Satwa, remains one of the few wholly 'organic' communities in this city of zones and gated developments. It's a fantastic place to wander around, two long buildings either side of the road packed with shops selling, in the main, clothes, bags and watches. You'll never see so many shifty looking geezers in your life, a constant wash of voices jabbering:

"Here! Here! Genuine fakes!"

"Come and see! We have a secret room!"

"Gucci bags! Gucci bags!"

"Watches? You want watches? Rolex?"

"This way, please, this way. We have Dolce and Gabbana, Versace, all good price."

Karama has long been the home of the fake trade, the place to go if you want to wear big name brands for knock-down prices. I was amazed that, clampdown after crackdown, it's still not only there, but thriving in the open. There are phases to IP protection campaigns that recognise the trade starts in the open, reverts to being 'under the counter' and then, as the crackdowns really bite, in a third place. Karama's out there in the open, under the counter AND in a third place, which is pretty comprehensive!

My other surprise was that the goods on sale represented knockoffs of brands that are very much available in the malls - big players in Karama right now include Ed Hardy, Mulberry, Louboutin and Bulgari. I had always thought that Karama post-crackdown only dealt in brands that had no recourse to local authority because they're not represented in the region. Think again, then...

My third surprise was the quality of the fakes. I 'm not even sure they are 'fakes' in the true sense of the word, because the factories making these things across China are, these days, likely the self-same factories making the real thing.

Cloudbusting

Image by ♥Melu♥Rogi♥ via FlickrFor some reason this reminded me of this!

Etisalat Plans - Mickey Mouse?

Image via WikipediaThe HTC Desire is a cool device, I have to tell you. It does many things brilliantly, some very well and even manages to be a mildly functional telephone. Based on Google's Android operating system, it's almost scarily integrated into Google services, but it does a lot of cool stuff and is pretty intuitive.

I've spent a week or so now getting used to it - after over 20 years of loyalty to Nokia, I finally snapped and followed Symbian Guru by throwing my N86 against the wall. There have been inevitable frustrations in the transition process, but they're mostly harmless. Google's habit of defaulting everything to Arabic for anyone located in the Arab World can be a bit of a shock - and I really do not need an uninstallable azan reminder. But all in all, I'm glad I made the change. Well, I was until Etisalat sent me a message telling me they have blocked my mobile Internet access as I had exceeded the upper limit on my plan.

My plan? What plan? I just have mobile Internet. It was called 'Mubashir' because nobody knew what 3G was ("I don't understand what 3G is!" "No problem, take this! It's called Mubashir!" "What is it?" "3G"). Nobody ever told me they'd introduced things called plans.

Mine apparently gives me 10 Meg of downloads for a fixed monthly fee. And then it charges me. A wicked amount. Enough for me to have racked up Dhs1,200 worth of phone bill in 2-3 days of using an Android phone. Because if you're using your wireless network to download apps and you walk out of the wireless zone, it defaults to Etisalat and their Mickey Mouse packages. And, unlike my creaky old Symbian handset,  this mobile is always online, checking, updating and RSSing like a little Googledemon.

You'd have thought Etisalat would send you a text when you got to the 10Mb mark, wouldn't you? But that would be far too sensible. They'd rather bill their unsuspecting, arguably duped, customers for the lesson.

So don't do what I did, people. When you throw that Symbian mobile against the wall and storm off to get a funky Android phone, change your mobile data plan. You can get a 1Gb package for Dhs145 per month or 5GB for 295 per month. They also offer "unlimited" data for a whopping Dhs395 per month. Unlimited is sort of like freehold, by the way: by unlimited, Etisalat actually means a 'fair usage' 10Gb maximum. Out of plan extras cost 50 fils per meg, which is a bit less than the Dhs15 per meg they charge on the default 10Mb package. Yes, you heard right. Dhs15 (a tad over $4) per megabit.

Plans from 10Mb - 1Gb are categorised as 'mobile Internet' by Etisalat, while 1GB-10GB are 'mobile broadband' and come with a USB modem. Because nobody would want to use a mobile for downloading lots of data, would they? Positively archaic thinking from the telco that likes to say 'ugh'...

Hmm. I wonder what the view from Du is like these days?


PS: Happy New Year, folks!

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...