Vickie

When we originally left the UK for the Gulf, we had to sell our car. Back then, at the dawn of time itself, things at work had been a tad stressy: Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait had brought business in the Middle East to a grinding halt and that meant a great deal of corporate belt tightening – which had included giving back the shiny company MR2 T-Bar and getting my own car. Having been warned by Sarah that I could come back from the dealer driving anything I liked as long as it wasn't a Volkswagen Polo, I duly arrived home in a Volkswagen Polo.

Green with beige velour seats, equipped with manual brakes (it took three miles to stop from a 30mph start) and generally crap, it was soon clear that the Polo was a nono and would have to gogo. The ensuing search was a long one, but we finally ended up with a stunning car: a Renault 5 Monaco. A limited edition ‘hot hatch’ with leather seats, a powerful injected engine and electric everything, all the Monacos were brown with a gold speed stripe. But golly did that car move – and it held to the road like glue, too. It was about as fast as a GT Turbo but without all the insurance overhead, fun to drive and just plain peachy.

But we had to sell it to move out East and so duly put an advert in Exchange and Mart. Sure enough, the calls came in, including one chap calling from the East End of London: the Isle of Dogs to be precise. He was going to travel up to us in Hitchin (an hours' journey at least) and take a look at ‘ver motor’.

The day arrived and he turned up with his fiancée Vickie in tow. They walked around the car, poked around in it and generally started the whole slam the doors and kick the wheels thing. But then Vickie retired, looking sulky. Whatever-his-name-was continued to do the What Car 25 Point Inspection Routine, but it was clear that there was trouble in Paradise. He eventually went over to Vickie and they had a conflab. And then he came over to us and uttered these immortal words.

“It’s brahn.”

Both he and Vickie had that full-on East Enders meets Del Boy accent that uses the full stop as an invitation to sort of tail off the sentence on a long, limp downward cadence. You know, ‘Braaahhhhnnn.”

I was shocked, to say the least. The Isle of Dogs to Hitchin is a considerable schlep and the advertisement had clearly stated ‘Renault 5 Monaco, brown’. All Renault 5 Monacos had this in common, a version of the Henry T Ford promise: you can have the car in any colour you like, as long as it’s brown. Monacos were to brown what Kate Bush was to sex.

I might have revealed too much there. Onwards.

“We said it was brown in the advertisement!” I managed to gasp.

“Yeah,” he said. And then, morosely: “But Vickie don’t like brahn.”

That was 15 years ago. Ever since, we have both made each other laugh time after time when anything brown comes into our lives. It’s a joke that has run and run: “Vickie don’t like brahn.’

Yes, perhaps we are simple minded, but there it is.

Something struck me this morning as we passed, laughing, a new house that a local gentleman is building on our route to work and has, for some bizarre reason, clad in precisely the same shade of brown as the inside of a Crunchie bar.

I’ve never had the chance to thank Vickie for the years of smiles and laughter she gave us that day...

ENOC/EPPCO - Thrown Out of Sharjah?

Image via WikipediaThe Emirates National Oil Company and the Emirates Petroleum Products Company, better known to us all as ENOC/EPPCO, or the ENOC Group, are facing a deadline to get their forecourts pumping fuel or face closure, according to today's papers who all delightedly slapped the news on their front pages.

As Mark Twain once said, "Never pick a fight with someone who orders ink by the barrel."

According to the reports (The National does by far the best job of reporting the story, BTW), the Sharjah Executive Council through the Sharjah Economic Department set a 72 hour deadline Tuesday (it meets each Tuesday) for the company to get its stations in Sharjah working again, which would give it until tomorrow (Friday) to comply. The ENOC Group operates 82 outlets across Sharjah and the Northern Emirates. Well, operated. They've been failing to actually sell any petrol for the past month.

The National reports that the penalty for non-compliance will be the closure of all service stations and facilities operated by the company in Sharjah. That's pretty hard-core.

The whole situation has been rendered that much more ridiculous by the company's early attempt at shrugging off the problem with a little slice of the mendacity that so many organisations here so readily employ when asked anything even remotely challenging by media. It appears we're learning the lessons all too slowly - it's not just print media that matter now: when you say your forecourts are closed because they're being upgraded, you can bet your bottom dollar that there are thousands of eye witnesses out there more than willing to share the 'Oh no they're not' online - with each other and, of course, with any watching media.

After that little slice of silliness, the company has refused any comment at all, every report in the media graced with the failure of the ENOC Group spokespeople to return calls or comment. The ongoing policy of silence in the face of public concern and the questions of media haven't helped the company at all. The explanation delivered to the Sharjah Executive Council (one was, apparently) is being treated by confidential by the SEC, but the papers have enough energy experts quoting away for us to be able to substantiate what commenters to my much, much earlier posts on this have said: the issue is one of being willing and able to continue to supply petrol at a loss because the company buys fuel on international markets and then has to sell at locally regulated prices, which are substantially lower.

Given this is the case, you'd be forgiven for wondering why they didn't just go ahead and say it. If the intention is to promote a change in the regulations or to gain some assistance in subsidizing the price of fuel, what could the possible harm be of letting the debate take place in public? If the company had been open and transparent about the situation in the first place, enunciated the issue and its position, it would likely have people understanding the issue and the company's response. There's even an argument that it would have prompted a faster and more positive resolution to the whole situation by bringing it out into the open.

Now they're facing being shut down and I can't see many tears being shed - particularly if they'll be replaced by nice, shiny ADNOC stations.

More Search Madness - Strange Searches Redux

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Occasionally I post some of the stranger searches to have landed in these dusty little rooms somewhere at the end of a long, dark corridor in a little-visited subterranean complex somewhere to the west of the Internet.

This harmless pastime is enabled by Sitemeter, a little widget that lets me know you have searched the World Wide Web for Cobblers in Satwa and ended up here as a result. This in itself wouldn't be interesting or strange if you weren't based in Helsinki, googling like a mad thing from the offices of Cargotech Corporation on your WindowsNT Macintosh. Why in heaven's name would anyone in Helsinki want to know about cobblers in Satwa? I've just come back from there, there are perfectly good shoe repair places in Helsinki!

Mind you, anyone using Safari when they've got both Firefox and Chrome installed on their desktop is a worry.

I'm very pleased that three to five-odd searches a day are landing on this post, which tells of how you can turn off the otherwise highly obtrusive Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook touchpad. It was a huge issue for me when I first got the machine and appears to have been blighting others all over the planet. It's easy to fix when you know how - the problem is Samsung won't tell you how. Similarly, a couple of searches a day are landing on this analysis of quite what's in Tim Horton's French Vanilla coffee and that's just as much a public service (the answer boiling down to no vanilla and a lot of ugly goo). And the ingredients of Pringles, tappiness of Aquafina, vileness of chicken rib meat and other food posts are perennially popular.

I should do more of them, actually - the fact that one person found the Pringles post by searching 'Pringles chip lips numb' is something of a concern - I hope they feel better now. Oh, I forgot to mention the post that details what egregious gleet is pumped into Subway's '9 grain wheat' bread. That's always good for a few ews.

Thanks to another nifty technology I use called Zemanta, someone landed here having searched Google images for 'Shaved West Highland Terriers', which is something of a worry. I've never actually posted about shaved Westies, you'll be pleased to know. Zemanta is responsible for the pictures I use to illustrate posts - it contextually suggests images (and links, but I don't use that) for posts derived from copyright free sources. One quirk of the system is that where I have more search 'grunt' than the original image location, people get to the image linked to this blog before they get to the image owner's site or Flickr or whatever. And I used a picture of a Westie to illustrate this here post about Nokia maps and the evolution of PC based mapping in general. I didn't know it was shaved, though. Honest.

Someone from Romania (working at Romania Data Systems, actually) googled nmkl pjkl ftmch for some reason best known to themselves and instead got a silly 'Shiny' post, for which I suppose I should apologise. I wonder if it's Romanian for something? Or is there an underground Young Ones fan scene developing there?

I am delighted to find myself a world authority on how to pronounce GITEX, but am baffled as to why anyone in Turkey should google 'Alexander McNabb Shemlan' - the blasted book's not even out yet!

I would appear to 'own' the search phrase 'rage Indian' which I think is odd. And I do get a grin every time someone googles something like 'what does "what to do yani" mean?', leading them invariably to this old but eternally popular post and leading me to think of someone else who's just been right royally shafted.

You can generally find your way here by appending the word 'fake' to any number of permutations, as the person who searched Yahoo! for 'Fake Boobbies' found out. And, in retrospect, I shouldn't have titled a post about Simian maniac George W Bush visitng Dubai 'Bush tickled' and apologise to the person who searched for that phrase and was so clearly disappointed. Similarly, the person googling 'best Philippine hooker bar in Dubai' must have felt suitably bilked to arrive here at this rant about the Observer's lazy piece on fleshpot Dubai.

And, finally, a raise of the glass to the most excellent individual who searched The Internet for 'Death To Modhesh'. I can only hope they found what they were looking for...