You know when your luck has run out.

Back again in the Middle East, this time at some beastly hot and dusty base outside of a modern gleaming city. We overcame some logistical trouble on the way here – delayed flights and a Lufthansa pilot strike being the major culprits – but persevered. Soon after landing, we picked up our rental cars and got lost, but a spate of dead reckoning served us well. At the base the next morning, our US military contact met us at the gate and got us right through. We thought we had survived the worst of it.

But on day three in country, the tides changed. I’ll blame arrogance. Not mine, not my team’s, but our government minder, who ignored all of the warnings and warning signs.


This trip falls coincident with one of the major Eids, a Muslim holyday that gets celebrated for a week. Imagine, however, that instead of going home to celebrate with your family for a few days, you get to stand post. Further imagine that the base is entirely empty, because everyone you work with is celebrating with their families, a stark reminder that you should have the day off and not be standing post. The next bit of imagining would be your reaction when a representative of the great Satan wants access to your base, forcing you from your reverie to open the gate by which you are standing post.

So it was absolutely no surprise when I saw the guard demand the backpack from said minder driving the car in front of us and confiscate the enclosed laptop. We had been told, numerous times over the prior few days, that local security might not want to be there over the holiday, and might take it out on us, so keep your technology in the trunk. Someone wasn’t listening.

Once alerted, the following two vehicles were stopped, trunks opened, and computers confiscated.

There’s a full color, two meter tall panel at the Host Nation badging office that clearly shows what they don’t want you to bring on base; weapons, computers, smart phones, GPSs, data storage devices, and VHS tapes to start. Our minder had an obvious computer bag on the front seat, a Blackberry in the console, and a GPS struck to the windshield, yet his reaction to the guard’s action was that he had done nothing wrong.

Wrong. The tacit arrangement was that we wouldn’t be jerks about violating their rules. Instead, we needed to spend ninety minutes retrieving our machines, so that we could lock them in the trunk of one of the cars that we would now leave outside of the gate. Who knows what a day’s worth of Middle Eastern sun would do to the contents of a trunk? We didn’t have much of a choice, short of returning to the hotel in the city and losing a few more hours.

Cleansed of our computers, we made it through the first gate, but were stopped at the second perimeter, where the now fully alerted guard snatched one of our cameras. This was turning into a slow morning, but plenty of cajoling and assurances got it returned to us and we were on our way to the third gate, U.S. controlled, where the guys at the gate had a different playbook, and allowed access with our computers, smartphones and cameras.

Except that later one of our cameras was confiscated by the US security, who thought we were photographing something on the list they can’t show us of things we can’t photograph. The resolution to that took another 40 minutes, four cops, and the deletion of everything on the data card.

Since then, we’ve left our machines at the hotel, risking the smartphones we use to take clandestine pictures of things we’re pretty sure are engineering related and not secret squirrel related. The major downside is that we have to take notes by hand, which equates to many hours of transcribing them by lamplight well into the evening. This cuts down on the time available to eat shawarma and mezza.

Again, we’ll persevere. If you can’t improvise and adjust to changing circumstances, you won’t make it long in the chaotic world of a global engineering consultant.

For example, this morning, we were trying to get some data off of a laptop (FOUO data, not Classified data). We’d tried emailing the files, but without an appropriate connection to the mother server attachments were impossible. We’d tried printing as pdf’s to mail, but the machine wouldn’t let us print. Ultimately, we hooked up an external hard drive as a file transfer device. This worked to get one set of files transferred, but ended up giving my machine the computer equivalent of SARS, or MERS, or Ebola. Regardless, I don’t have wifi now, which makes getting data from every other source a little more difficult, especially since the data outlets in this hotel don’t seem to work.

Maybe we can open up my phone as a hotspot and hardwire the phone to the machine? Some kind of McGruder solution is sure to do the trick.

Or blow up in my face.

I’ll let the help desk figure it out next week.
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Watar, Watar, Everywhere

In one of the local newspapers the other day, I read that the origin of the word Qatar came from some other term, and some other before it, but the one before that meant “search for water”. This is not at all surprising, as it’s danged hot here all of the time, and I never step outside without a water bottle. It would be worse if your job was to keep your sheep from withering, but in the past week I haven’t seen a single sheep, or goat, or camel. I did see a couple of cats in a souq, but I’m sure they take care of themselves.

What I have seen is an abundance of water, no searching required. Not always in liquid form, but the evidence is there; grand boulevards lined with date palms and topiary; sweeping lawns, manicured gardens. They’ve got the Persian/Arabian Gulf all around them, and their huge oil and gas reserves fuel massive desalination plants. It could well be that the irrigation water is all treated effluent from the municipal sewer plant – but that hasn’t been commissioned yet. Much of the effluent would be hauled to specific irrigation sites, but I’d guess a large volume of the irrigation water comes direct from the potable distribution system.

Yesterday morning, I went down to the beach to watch the sun come up. The silence was eventually broken by the hotel staff doing their morning things. They need to drag the beach of any footprints remaining from yesterday. They set up the poolside bars and restaurants. They sweep everything that isn’t grass or beach. They hose down all of the furniture. And there’s lots of furniture, from the lounges at the pool to the other lounges near the Gulf. From the al fresco dining areas near the hotel to the snack bar near the kiddie pool.

They do this with a hose, with no control or nozzle, turned all the way up. It took an hour. If our well system could produce half of this volume, I’d never worry about irrigating the garden again. These guys never worry at all, just throw more dinosaurs at the power plants and strip the salt out of another few million gallons a day. The Peninsula reports 437 million cubic meters of desalinated water per year. This equates to about 150 gallons per day per capita. In the States, 150 gpd is a pretty good planning factor, but most of the States aren’t in a desert and most of our water comes from freshwater sources without the energy cost of purifying it. In the Qatari defense, they are really rich. Really rich. And the oil and gas comes out of the ground like lies flow out of Washington. I can only hope that their rhetoric about environmental sustainability is more than simple rhetoric.

And for full disclosure, our per capita water in the US of A is almost ten times 150 gpd, but 80% of that is for cooling power plants and irrigation, the rest is for manufacturing, commercial and domestic use.

Meanwhile, the impetus for this trip came from the need for me to attend a meeting. A single meeting. A single meeting scheduled to last an hour. A single meeting scheduled to last an hour on the far side of the planet.

Success!

The other side of the coin is that I need to be in Saudi Arabia for two days of site investigation, but that’s not until next week. So I could have flown home, spent two days there, then flew back to this side of the world, or I could do what I did, hang out in a four star hotel on the water for five days. I’m not entirely sure I made the right choice.

The Intercontinental, while nice and all, is one of those mostly inclusive places. Not inclusive in that everything is provided for one daily rate, but inclusive in that there is nothing else near this place, so I’m sort of stuck eating every meal here. Sure, it’s all expensed, but I’m just not sure I’m getting the best value for the Company at their 240 Riyal buffet (about 65 bucks). Alternatively, I could take a taxi into a restaurant in the city center and back, but would likely total the same.

Besides, taxis in the Middle East (or anyplace I get sent) can be exciting places, and the more I do this, the more I evaluate risk, and carefully select the exciting places I frequent. Maybe that’s just me becoming more crotchety. Maybe it’s just me being bored in Qatar, waiting for these five days to end.

I did make a trip out yesterday. I went to what was once an ancient souq just off of the water at the city center. Parts of it were very, very old I’m sure, but the boutique hotels around the perimeter told a different tale. It was hard to tell who actually shopped there, as I went there very early in the day, wanting to see the place open up in the morning, when it would be cooler and more quiet, and didn’t see much trade. There was a mix of touristy and housewares, local clothing and spices. All of it in shallow, narrow shops, crammed pell-mell into some seemingly random shape with crooked lanes, blind alleys, dim lighting, roofs and ceiling of differing heights and coverage, plenty of shadows, unclear sightlines, and elevation changes out of nowhere.

I took a lot of pictures, but not especially for posterity. The one hour meeting concerned special training facilities, and realism is key for those types of places. When I finally get to design my training souq, I’ll incorporate many of the geometric and architectural elements of this place.

Bottom line, just more work. I’d never vacation here. I’d rather spend time on the water.


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Busy, busy, busybody

Busy, busy, busy.

I'd type more, but need to catch a flight in a couple of minutes. For the curious, I'm in Kuwait this week, heading to Guam tonight, then back home next week. It's been frantic, but there's been shawarma. Not as good as Saudi shawarma, but shawarma, nonetheless.

We're at the Crowne Plaza which, in Kuwait, is a five star hotel. They've been hosting swank weddings all week, which seem bigger and louder than any in the States - despite the lack of booze. Last night, I stood in the parking lot to watch the Bugatti's, Maseratti's, and Rolls's roll in. Quite the sight as I ate my Baskin Robbins.

They ain't all filthy rich here, but there's a lot more of it that the other sides of the planet.

Sure it's short, so here's some filler by Neil Peart. For this week, change the hours from nine and five to five and nine. Oh, and eliminate the reference to beer. This is the Middle East.

Working Man

I get up at seven, yeah
And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

[Chorus:]
It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the working man

They call me the working man
I guess that's what I am

I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out a nice, cold beer
Always seem to be wonderin'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

[Chorus]

Well, they call me the working man
I guess that's what I am

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