The Dubai Letters: 4. Working
Dubai, United Arab Emirates -- January 2007

One of the reasons for moving to Dubai was for the experience it presented -- both at work and out of it. The years immediately following graduation are meant for gaining the knowledge and experience that you did not gain at university. You move towards chartership; that point of your career when you get to put a few extra letters after your name^[1] in exchange for paying the Institute a bit more money. My career stagnated in Swindon for a while; I was not getting the experience I needed, and the Middle East offered opportunities the roundabout capital of the U.K. did not.

My career development is discussed in a team meeting in December, where I am asked if I am interested in managing my own project. Sensing a trap, I try to answer with just the right balance of indifference and enthusiasm, but two weeks later I am handed an old proposal. 'Read it,' I am told. 'That's your new project.'

It is a small maritime project in Doha, the capital of Qatar. Of course, I am supervised throughout, but it is nice to think that this is now my baby; any triumphs are my triumphs, any fuck-ups are mine alone.

I return from my Christmas break to find the flat is in exactly the same state as when I left. We have no furniture; the tevelision is still unconnected. Now, I do not miss T.V. -- it is a time-sink I am better off without -- but furniture is another matter. I tire of doing everything in my room; whilst a bed undoubtedly has its uses, it is no substitute for a table or a chair.

At the end of my first week back my patience snaps. I venture, once more, to Ikea.

A week later my furniture is delivered. 2 sofas; 2- and 3-seaters in a navy blue. An almost black coffee table. A glass-topped dining table. An oak veneer bookcase. The items are simple and functional, cheap even, but I have to admit I like the fact that a third of my lounge is now furnished. I like how it looks.

There is a shed under a bridge.

A warren of prefab huts and temporary, make-do construction, showing the signs of age and reckless attempts at expansion and modification. The company logo in front is dirty with desert and pollution. The paintwork is chipped and sun-bleached. The carpets are grey and stained. The noticeboards on the walls compete for space with permanently marked white boards, the ancient diagrams and to-do lists layered over one another like hieroglyphs.

The vehicle barriers stop working when it rains, are hastily wrapped in bin-liners.

They say that we are one of the oldest, most established companies in Dubai. When I first arrive in the office I can believe it; the office is a relic. This is a place of glass and steel; our bin-liner and cracked-paint corner of it is a joke.

It is a source of much amusement amongst me and my colleagues. We look up enviously at the sky-scrapers and towers; hang our heads when outsiders enter our domain.

There is a camraderie amongst the team, born by the pace of construction here and the long hours we spend together. We mock each other relentlessly, the ribbing for the most part good-natured. There is a sense of team that was absent in the offices of Swindon and Berkshire, and it is welcome and reassuring when the stress threatens to drive us all mad.

My room overlooks the car park (as much as any ground floor room can overlook anything). It is an annex to what is known as the Iraq room, neighbouring a meeting room and the tea-boys' toilet. The clearing of throats and the slamming of doors is the soundtrack to our day.

I share the room with two others; each of them my superior in the sense that they are both older and uglier than myself. We constitute the majority of the ports, and get on as well as can be expected considering we are always bitching at each other.

In the new year our boss announces that he wants an office night out organised. Normally I approach such things with trepidation^[2]; in Swindon, nights out with friends from work were one thing, but departmental nights out were quite another. The only thing you have in common with most of these people is that you get angry at the same photocopier as they do, and there is a tendancy for the conversation to keep finding its way back to engineering^[3].

However, the emphasis on team here is paramount, so I accept the invitation. Besides, we hardly ever talk about work at work, so we should probably be safe.

We go to the Cellar, an all-you-can-eat restaurant across the duck pond from the Irish Village. Now, I've probably sung the praises of all-you-can-eat enough already, so suffice it to say that the food was pretty impressive, both in quality and price. The restaurant is notable for the fact that there is a set menu^[4] -- and that its proximity to the Irish Village presents the perfect opportunity for ending the night with a couple of pints of Guinness.

The night itself is a success because of the relative lack of work talk encountered. It is refreshing because my longest serving friends-from-work here are highways engineers who love to bemoan Dubai's woefully inadequate traffic system.

Back at work, my debut project had progressed nicely up until the Christmas break. When I return from the U.K. nothing much has changed except that the project deadline is suddenly two and a half weeks closer. I panic, beset by a vision of myself missing the deadline because there appears to be more work than there are days to do it in.

One evening, with some of those aforementioned highways engineers, our taxi driver takes a wrong turn off a roundabout. The road he leads us down is relatively narrow, and the lawns either side elegantly managed. The road ends in what appears to be an empty car park, with a high wall at the far side. A gate in the wall. Two seats. Containing soldiers. Carrying rifles.

'Um . . .'

One of the soldiers is on his feet and approaching us before we even stop. He looks angry. He carries his gun by the barrel.

The driver winds down his window and begins talking to the soldier in Arabic. The soldier is clearly angry, and getting angrier by the second, but our driver appears somehow unable to identify this stranger's emotion. I am in the seat behind him, and I can see from his reflection in the wing-mirror that he is smiling. His jovial mood is not making the soldier relax any. In fact, it appears to be having the reverse affect, as now the second soldier is standing up, eyeing us uneasily.

I look at my fellow passengers. This guy is going to get us killed, I think, not entirely in jest.

The soldier is shouting now. Thankfully, something in the taxi driver's subconcious overrides his apparent deathwish, and he reverses the taxi, turns, and retreats back down the driveway.

Some seconds pass in silence. Eventually, my friend in the front passenger seat asks, 'Was that Sheikh Mo's house?'

The driver laughs. He tells us, yes, it was indeed Sheikh Mo's palace. He goes on to tell us that the soldier was worried that we were going to try and storm the palace, that we were carrying a car bomb or something.

I wonder if the taxi is going to fine us for soiling his taxi, considering it was his fault.

Eventually, my friend speaks again. 'You know,' he says. 'I would have expected the palace to be a bit more impressive than that.'

I generally approve of Tex-Mex restaurants much more than I approve of the name. If you want to dine somewhere that knows the value of covering a plate in meat and fries, with the only salad being a bit of garnish so small that you could eat it without even realising it, you cannot usually go wrong.

We visit one on a night when we are generally at a bit of a loss of where to go or what to do. On entering, we are initially put off. The bouncer asks us for identification, even though I am the youngest of the party at 27. The house band is a quartet of Filipinos who are singing cheesy-pop from the 80's. None of the waiting staff appear to be Tex or, in fact, Mex.

The food, however, saves the day, as I am eventually presented with a surf and turf that features a slab of meat that you could kill a man with, and some prawnsshrimp that I'm fairly sure had to be genetically modified. Further investigation reveals that the place is not only a restaurant, but also a late bar. For all the 80's pop, the out-of-place house band do manage to create a certain lively atmosphere and the dancefloor soon fills.

We leave following our meal deciding that it might not be a bad place to spend a night, and soon realising that, request for IDs or not, it was the only place in the area we were able to get into. We taxi elsewhere.

The buzzword of Dubai nightlife is 'house'. There is a train of thought amongst Dubai's event organisers and promoters that everyone in the city wants to listen to house music. As someone to whom house music sounds like a whole lot of pointless noise, you can imagine my excitement when I first hear talk amongst the posse of a night called Twisted Melons.

Held at iBO at Millenium Airport Hotel on the last Friday of every month, Twisted Melons would appear to be Dubai's only indie and alternative night. It plays a whole raft of old classics that makes it a firm favourite of the mid-to-late twenties set^[5], and yet it features a strong proportion of more recent guitar-based music by bands whose names begin with 'The'. Strong enough to attract a range of ages; from the students to the married guys who have long-ago packed away their air guitars. It is one of the most popular expat nights, and is attended with an almost religious fervour by those who haven't found a home in the house-music or RNB playing clubs.

I have been a couple of times now, and each time has been a blast. Great music; a whole host of friends, both old and new; cheap beer; free entry; more attractive women than the equivalent night in the UK would have typically had (in both quality and quantity). Better still, the girls are generally a lot friendlier than you find elsewhere and none of them -- to my knowledge, at least -- are working girls.

My project progresses towards completion, but I am held up by the work of others, and my unfamiliarity of the ways in which certain things are done here in the middle east. Getting drawings changed takes days at a time, due to the fact that our CAD technicians reside in Sharjah, the neighbouring emirate. My programme is held up by over a week because I do not account for the fact that my boss had far more pressing matters to be dealing with than checking my report; such as running the department or looking after commissions that were worth than my piddling 190,000AED.

My draft submission misses the deadline by almost two weeks. My neighbours assure me that I have done well, but I cannot help but get a little depressed. It is my first stab at project management, and considering that I have been given a free rein in the running of it I cannot help but feel that I could have gotten closer to the deadline. I try to convince myself that I was set an unachieveable task in order to teach myself a valuable lesson -- that of dealing with failure, perhaps, or the importance of doing a good job against being on time with a half-arsed attempt at quality -- but in the end I know that I did not do well enough first time round. I continually self-assess, and find both my ideas and my output over the last six weeks wanting.

My engineering-flunk, my self-doubt, lasts a couple of weeks. The praise for my report does little to buoy my confidence. What does help is that soon I am given another project to manage, more complicated than the last. I did well enough to convince my boss that I could do this, it seems. I come to realise that no one expected me to do an amazing job first time round; I am, after all, only an assistant engineer, and I have years yet to learn how to be brilliant at it.

For now, the fact that my superiors are pleased with my output and that they are keen for me to continue to take this responsibility is enough.

[1] I am currently only entitled to four: MEng, which is so few you never really bother to use them. With chartership, I will effectively triple my number of letters.
[2] I still occassionally wake in a cold sweat remembering the company pub-quiz that ended with a round about the company's intranet and quality assurance procedures. I have repressed most of that night, but I am fairly sure that the questions were set by someone from my department.
[3] And such talk tends to repel most women more effectively than offensive body odour.
[4] And all that stops me from fully exploiting this is the fact that none of my work colleagues appear to want more than one main course.
[5] I'm talking about those songs I haven't heard in ten or twelve years, but absolutely loved when I was listening to them in school. These are the songs that I can't even remember getting played at alternative nights when I was at university.