Cox of Arabia: From the Shield to the Souq
Part One
Hello!
I’m in my fifth week here, now, and loving it.
There’s a lot to reflect on, and my opening period here saw some particularly memorable moments. Some of which I’ll lead you through in the coming post or two. I haven’t fallen foul of the authorities, but I have, amongst other things been shouted at, had a man hold my hand, lost the plot in a kayak (yes, again but of course I waited for SWK to visit before doing that), run about 50 miles, bought a £10 pint of lager, bashed some dunes, flipped the bird at Saudi Arabia and fallen down a hole, so it’s not been uneventful.
However, as I said last time, it’s been a long road travelled, before getting this random but fascinating opportunity. The two years since I left my last full-time job in Dec ’15 were quite the trial, as it was, of course, an unexpected appearance at the Jobcentre for yours truly the following month. I’d argue that at times I was simply unlucky not to land something new, and at other times I met with such self-regarding and unfriendly interview panels as to make the whole thing even more dispiriting than usual.
However, what with me being unavoidably me, I have conspired to shoot myself in the foot now and again. And never more so than at the University of Kent, which is a place I have had three no-results at, now. I regard it now quite unfavourably, even though it did well by my Sister when she was an undergraduate there. I simply cannot get work there – and here’s why:
It’s an institution that has a very specific and largely unvarying procedure for interview days. And it’s an eyeballs-out, thoroughly hardworking affair. You’d have much quieter and less tiring days in an actual job. It combines that, in my experience, with a predilection for a decent handful of internal candidates, each time. And tends to rather glad-hand such folk whilst leaving the rest of you rather feeling like ‘meat in the room’; there, simply, to make up the numbers.
Still, one must make the best of one’s opportunities, eh? Such was my intention on my first trip there, just under a year ago – my how time flies. Dropped the hound off with Ma and Pa and made for the University in the early morning. Found where I needed to be, parked up, and sourced a bracing coffee to up the heart rate for battle.
Arrived at the final location, to be met by a crowd of other interviewees. Yippee. There’s nothing like having to stare down the opposition all day, being polite whilst wondering if you could poison their coffee or push them, accidentally and tragically, down some stairs. But I persevered, shook hands and settled in for the day. A panel of about 2456 staff appeared and talked us through the plan for the day. An innocent-enough-sounding ‘individual task’, to be followed by chairing discussions on important matters with fellow panellists, and then on to an ‘inbox’ exercise, before a 10 minute presentation and then, if one was afforded one, a final interview. Told you, didn’t I? Bonkers.
It was the task that set the tone, and I’d shot the gun directly downwards within 20 minutes of the process getting underway.
We were stationed at intervals around a large square of desks, and our mistress of ceremonies for the day promptly pulled out a wodge of large pieces of paper and a number of thick, coloured markers.
“If you’ll turn your papers over” she said, “you’ll see we want you to design and complete a Personal Leadership Shield.”
There was a long silence. A group of experienced, middle-aged adults, we met one another’s eyes with a uniform expression that said, “did you hear what I just heard?” However, it was all true. The piece of paper had a list of different criteria that we were to set out on the paper in the form of a shield.
“Oh, and please put your name on your work” our lady said, as she tapped start on the clock.
It was quite the flurry of a 20 minutes. My main challenge was to hand draw a shield shape that roughly filled the page, giving enough space to write in, and that was roughly a uniform shape. That took some time.
My combatants were taking a range of approaches. Chap to my right seemed to be filling his with some random hieroglyphs, and the young woman opposite wrote stuff non-stop in tiny script, at a hundred miles an hour, all over hers, her tongue poking out in concentration. I went for a bit of a middle-ground approach, and marked out some prompts, to which I would be able to talk if needed.
The time having flown by, I reminded myself that it was time for the artist to sign his work. I was oddly put in mind of the Gallery section of the late Tony Hart’s ‘Take Hart’ programme, from my 80’s childhood. Absent-mindedly, I wrote in a sort of freehand Comic Sans in the top left-hand corner:
Christopher Cox: Aged 42 ⅔
A bit of piss-taking that rebounded on me later in the day, when in the interview I was met with my handiwork sat on an easel when I entered the room to sit down.
“We wondered why you put your age on the shield?” came pretty much the first question. My fate was sealed. Drummed out for not being Serious enough, I went home and started filling out my expenses form. That fact that this University is 240 miles from our present home does, at least, mean I turn a small profit every time I go down there.
So yeah, my fault, I get it, but it’s an institution not without its other sins. Each and every time I have been there I have had to complete the same, 2-hour, in-tray exercise. And I am here to tell you it cannot be done in the time available. I’ve had three goes, and I’m getting better at it, but you cannot do it. On another occasion I was taken out halfway through the exercise to go and give a presentation in a distant lecture hall. The woman in the front row was bloody knitting. Never looked up once. I was furious! And no one came back to fetch me, so I got hopelessly lost trying to find the room we were in and had to ask a couple of students where the building was.
They are not on my Christmas card list, let’s be assured of that. Still, the last miserable visit there was the one before I flew out here and got this job, so yah, boo and sucks to them. They’re sat there at home freezing to death, and I’m looking out from the 23rd floor at the pure blue of the Persian Gulf.
But none of that matters, ridiculous though it was. I’m here now, and enjoying life. Let’s have a look over that first week, shall we?
30 days ago, I bumbled up to London on the train with my case. The night before, my Mother (I was staying at the brink of departure with the parentals, as they were looking after the hound whilst SWK cracked the boards in Eastbourne) set about the task of packing said case for me, as I made the necessary selections of items going and items staying. Qatar Airways offers a thoroughly decent 32Kg of luggage, and I am now bewildered as to how anyone manages to pack a case with that weight of stuff that they actually need. Primed with a few shirts, some toothpaste and a couple of improving volumes, my bag was suddenly a dense 28Kg and as manoeuvrable as an offcut of Dark Matter. When the time comes to leave this place, I’m going to invest in something larger, stronger and lighter. Mostly so I can bring back a ten-year supply of aftershave, which is tremendously cheap out here.
Anyway, I hauled said item up to Terminal 4 at Heathrow Airport, and left it in the hands of the baggage handlers. The striptease that is airport security followed, and I was soon installed with my last couple of pints for a while, before making for the skies.
The journey was uneventful, all in all. I missed a chunk of a film thanks to falling asleep from the beer, and the queue to get into the country (armed with my precious visa, which had cost me more than £1,000 and counting) was tremendously long, but once I was in the hands of the driver hired to take me to my quarters, all was well. We whizzed up the highway (driving is undertaken in this country either sat still in queues, or jousting with others at 70 mph, and pretty much nothing in between those states), past all the pretty lights and soon enough Casa Suggzy loomed up above us. Some admin, general fawning over the new, sweaty guest, and hauling of the case into the lift followed, and before I knew it I was exhaustedly making myself a cup of tea to wash down my complimentary digestive biscuits, whilst failing to get the Wi-Fi to work.
I’d been gifted a couple of days to start to establish myself here and find a bit of a routine. Unpack, get some shopping in, that sort of thing. I didn’t stray far, but my major mission was to find the City Center Mall (Qataris love a good mall – there’s one every 60 feet or so, air-conditioned down to roughly the temperature of the UK right now) and the Carrefour supermarket. I set out the following afternoon. It was still pretty warm here at that point – 36 degrees or so. I found the place well enough, and espied a number of discarded trolleys between my apartment that gave credence to the theory that one could wheel larger shops back to one’s quarters. Which will be welcome next Sumer when it’s a gentle 50 degrees of Mercury or thereabouts.
I inhaled the contents of a Bento Box in a Japanese place on the second floor, and immediately felt rather more myself again, having been initially a smidgen bewildered by the sight of an ice rink on the ground floor. Where else, but the Desert, I ask you? I braced myself for Friday afternoon shopping, and then spent the better part of 90 minutes finding the ingredients, condiments and fluids necessary to sustain life for my first week. It did not take long to discover that one trick at the supermarket is to ignore the British, American or similar brand name presented to you as the first option, and seek out, instead, a rough Middle-Eastern equivalent. Spending £6 for 250g of Seriously Strong Cheddar would likely make this whole affair a bit less of a money-spinner, I soon decided. Plus, the Russian Roulette of buying the unfamiliar makes life entertaining, I reckon.
I got to the checkouts with my spoils, and was soon approached by a tiny Indonesian member of staff, who told me there was a better queue for me to join. Fair enough, I thought, and was about to propel my cart in her direction, when I realised she had taken the other end of it and had set off at a remarkable rate of knots for one of her dimensions and the weight of the nosebag, I broke into a trot and caught up with her about 40 yards up the store.
Cue the unveiling of my first error. I dutifully placed everything on the conveyer belt, and stationed myself the other side, having asked, to some bewilderment, for some plastic bags.
“They’re over there” said the cashier, pointing at a pile of 564658 of them.
One does not pay for plastic bags, in Qatar, I learned.
I merrily began stuffing my loot into the bags, until I heard a sound of consternation from the till.
“These have no barcode!” she said, swinging two limes at me, housed in their cellophane bag, much like a little pair of lonely green bollocks.
“Ah, now, well I did wonder about that but I..” I started out..
“NONE of these have a barcode!” she came back, wielding a range of zucchini, broccoli florets and onions in similarly open bags, without codification.
I met her questioning gaze with a furrowed brow, and started to babble.
“WEIGH THESE” she shouted, to an elderly retainer in a yellow set of overalls, whereupon the little fellow took my small farm’s worth of veg right back to the beginning of the store to do so. It transpired, and this is a mistake that lots of wet-behind-the ears fellow like me make, that there are always two members of staff on a desk, where their job is to whirl the bags out of your hand and tie them in a single knot, bash in the code (from memory, seemingly) for the contents and barcode them at the sort of speed that would delight an F1 pit crew. It’s quite something to witness.
After a time, the old boy returned with it all, and commerce concluded for the day. The interregnum had been about five minutes or so, and I had rather feared that my error would have met with the sort of howls of derision and huff that I had come to know from the UK. But not a bit of it – point of fact was that the local pace of life is such that no one really cares about this stuff. The lads behind me, with their purchase of about 25 sacks of coffee, simply chatted-up the cashier whilst we all waited.
I wheeled things away, and down an escalator, thinking to rattle back to the gaff and leave the trolley in an appropriate spot. I made for the doors, back out into the heat, and proceeded to sweatily spend ten minutes in the near-darkness of the underground car-park, drawing honks and parps from a number of 4×4 owners as they tried their best to turn me into jam.
Going nowhere fast, I gave up and made my way back to the doors and the blissful air-conditioning. I arrived to the surprised stares of quite a lot of Doha-residents, looking out from under their cool robes at the pink man who’d evidently decided he wanted his week’s shopping fully refunded.
I found another door – looking back a fire exit, I think, and crashed it open, making down a side alley and into the thrum of the street. My spirits soared, but then died, as I realised there appeared no way to drop my trolley down to street level. Actually, there was, but with night having fallen, I could not make it out for love nor money. When it gets dark here, it does so quickly, and absolutely.
“How difficult can it be”, I asked myself aloud, “to gather up these four heavy bags and my man-bag full of non-alcoholic beers, and stagger back two blocks with it by hand?”
Within about 50 yards, I realised that it was tremendously difficult. I was soon heaving for my breath, and had the brow and the back and the armpits of a man who’s been left in a sauna for a good fortnight. I took a wrong turn, and soon managed to completely misplace my 25-storey apartment block. I staggered around manfully for about 20 minutes, and eventually found a stray trolley. Dumped my stuff in it, got Google Maps running (yep, I know), and realised my building was directly behind me. Genius.
Back at Reception, many staff hurried to me aid, and helped me into the lift, as the perspiration of my Herculean endeavour cooled against my skin. After two trips, I found myself on my knees on the floor of my apartment, aircon turned up to full, bemoaning a lost baguette, and hoping to Allah that this would, in future, prove a little easier.
Of course, easier it has indeed become. But not without the odd pitfall – one literal one, in fact.
More of that soon. I’ll be back in another week or so to tell you how I finally got my residency permit, my deafness cured, and my tongue burned by a salad.
suggzy 