Nothing New Under the Sun

After a few hundred thousand miles, I thought that I had this International travel thing figured out. Sure, there’s not much you can do about a lost bag, except wait for it to be found. [To mitigate the potential loss, though, it’s a good idea to split stuff between your checked bag and carry on, just in case.] The effect of missed, cancelled, or incredibly delayed flights can also be eased through the use of a really good travel agent, that the Company has so, while inconvenient, there are logistics workarounds. I carry plenty of reading material and plenty of meds, and even got a dual band world phone. This, more, and armed with the “Be Prepared” motto I found in the Boy Scouts generally prepares me for whatever’s going to go wrong.

But not always.


We got off of the plane in Doha with no incident and little fanfare. There are just two of us, so it was an easy task to round up the team. The flight was fine, the bags were delivered. All we needed to leave the airport was a rental car (an unsatisfying Dodge Avenger, with huge blind spots).

The rental car business is somewhat smaller in the Middle East than in the States. There’s not the massive parking lot dedicated to each agency that you might be used to. At Doha, the agent is in a countered cubicle adjacent to the countered cubicles of each of the other 20 rental car agencies. Once the documentation is complete, another nondescript (except to his mother, of course) appears to walk us out to our vehicle, perhaps half a kilometer away in a small lot lost within the mass of public parking lots. Even in an Englishcentric environment, I think it would be hard to describe how to find the place. Of course, using well designed signage would be cheating, but would also relieve Mr. Nondescript of his job.

Anyway, we trudged along behind him through the 100^ heat of the late evening. At the car, he unlocked and started it, so that the air conditioning would warm up and cool down the interior before our drive to the hotel. In the mean time, we did the visual inspection and locked our bags in the trunk. Final papers in order, I reached for the front door, only to find it locked, car running, bags sealed in the trunk, air conditioner blasting.

“Hmmm”, I said, actually saying, “Hmmm.”

About 40 minutes later, a second set of keys appeared, which was about 38 minutes after we had exhausted the entire English repertoire of Mr. Nondescript. The lesson – take the keys and keep them.

A couple of days later we dropped off the car, simply leaving it in the public lot and taking the ticket back to a small shack and letting the attendants know about where we had left it. The inside of the shack was lined with very small carrels for the representatives of each of the various car agencies. As I dealt with my business, I watched the screen of the adjacent agent, who was systematically paging through great collections of Facebook images, selecting the pretty girls and making friend requests of them, at a rate of close to 10 per minute. He was a friend making machine, and I wish him all the best.

On the other hand,… Zach and I are being accompanied by up to five government minders, all bureaucrats from the United States who work to make sure that we don’t spend money from the cyan pot, when this money is only to be spent from the aquamarine pot. They are masters of tiny little regulations. It came as some surprise, then, when the one I really wasn’t getting along with tried to enter the UAE with his diplomatic passport, when only the citizen passport is accepted, unless he had a letter from the State Deportment countersigned by the local embassy, in quadruplicate.

Bottom line, he wasn’t allowed past the immigration desk and got deported within hours. So, with the scheduled early departure of one of the others, we two are down to just three minders, but for just two more days.
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Embrace the Suck

This is my third day in country, which means I should be over the jet lag, yet I’m still shagged beyond belief. Perhaps it’s the sapping and oppressive heat during the day, perhaps the non-stop schedule of meetings and field reconnaissance, perhaps the fact that I was typing meeting minutes into the wee hours, only to get up with the sun to start it all over again. Or perhaps a blend of everything.


Typically, I’d bring three or four others with me on a trip like this, allowing them to pick up the slack as I simply put them in the right places with the right people and let nature take its course. This trip, there was so little lead time, and such restrictive staff availability, that I barely secured a graphics person, who dramatically overslept this morning, which gives me some time to pound out this missive.

Meanwhile, there are 20 projects to scope on three desert air bases over about ten days, and I’m exhausted.

Qatar is our first stop. As with the other two, it’s an unnatural monarchy developed by the west after the War to End All Wars (I’d think a “natural” monarchy would have involve someone, at some time, beating the shit out of any and all comers, thereby earning the title, which could be handed down for generations (at least, that’s how Conan did it)). Qatar hasn’t been caught up in the recent Arab uprisings, probably because most Qataris are satisfied with their lot in life – they typically don’t labor, have positions of influence, and get a healthy stipend from the oil revenues. The working class, however disenfranchised they may feel, are almost all foreign labor, who would quickly lose their jobs and be deported if they caused any trouble.

I’m in that second class, despite the swank hotel and trappings.

If you want to know what Qatar looks like, stand six inches from a tan wall and stare at it. Qatar is tan and sand and rocks. There’s development in the cities, of course, but the countryside is barren, with barely any grazeable scrub. On site, there is half a meter of this tan/sand/rock mix, and then just tan rock until the center of the earth, or perhaps just until you hit the natural gas deposits. The rock is immutably hard and unexcavatable. After the overburden is stripped away, large pneumatic breakers are brought in to fracture the hard stuff, which needs further processing before it could be used as backfill. Bottom line, any earthworks or trenching will be expensive, sapping dollars that could go into facilities.

Meanwhile, it’s going to be 109^ today.

Embrace the suck.
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