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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Poppe Wanted a Turkish Coffee.

Poppe wanted a Turkish coffee, so we walked to the Bon Café drive through on the way back from lunch. It’s open 24/7/365, except for prayer time five times a day. Even now, I’m not sure what to think of my cappuccino, as the thought of a Turkish coffee so close to Turkey had me wary. It was hotter than blazes, thick, and immensely powerful. I probably won’t need another dose until tomorrow. And silt. Lots and lots of silt.

Fortunately, it only cost me 10 Riyals – cheap anywhere for a froo froo coffee. On the whole, this seems the right cost. I bought lunch for four of us for 65 Riyals, about 17 bucks, and we were stuffed – hence, the need for strong coffee. It’s been worse, costwise. The lunch buffet at the Radisson in Riyadh was 208 Riyals (you do the math). Expensive, but the lamb was mighty tasty.



Riyadh was another huge middle eastern capital city. Not quite as chrome and glass as Abu Dhabi or Dubai, but still expansive, crowded, and dusty. Traffic was horrible. Not as crowded as Cairo, but the drivers are worse and they tend to drive large American cars and SUVs. No shit, I think the most popular car here is the Crown Victoria, followed closely by the Grand Marquis. It’s like a step into the past, except that they all look to be of fairly recent vintage. Of course, if could be that the arid desert climate keeps them pristine, but if that was the case, we should be seeing more thirty year old Tatas.

[Actually, I have no clue if Indian cars were ever imported into “The Kingdom”, or if it was even an automobile manufactory thirty years ago, it’s just that women are very rarely on the street, and those that are are very well hidden – so it’s just Freudian.]

I eventually choked down the coffee, but fluidization is paramount here, so I’m now enjoying (if that’s the word) a Green Apple Flavored Budweiser Non Alcoholic Malt Beverage. Perhaps one day, centuries from now, real beer will be available here, but I’m not counting on any change very soon. The cultural restrictions here are too deeply ingrained. Meanwhile, the GAFBNAMB isn’t horrible, probably better than the Tang they serve for breakfast, so I’ll likely have another. There are small shops scattered generously around the hotel, so a new supply of beverages is easy to obtain, along with some tasty local dates and, as has become the norm on these excursions, ice cream after dinner.

The ice cream selection isn’t nearly as good as in Japan, but ice cream is, usually, ice cream. I say “usually” because Jim and I stopped at a small shop in Riyadh while walking around last week and what they scooped and served to us looked like the real deal, but must have had something extra to prevent melting. Perhaps it was latex, I can’t be sure, but it was sort of rubbery, and I broke the little spoon.
With the free time we have today, a group of us will head south from Al Qassim to Al Koht, where we are scheduled to tour a date plantation and factory, and perhaps check out a heritage village. It’s sure to beat spending another day in a crowded conference room. Besides, we leave Al Qassim tomorrow for points north, and I’ll probably never have another chance to see the sites of this district.

This tour started in Riyadh, the seat of government and, for my purposes, the seat of the Ministry of Defense and its assorted acronymic agencies. Over the next few weeks, we’ll visit four more sites and do our thing. I’m not entirely sure how the Saudi Land Forces are organized, but our meetings thus far have been a little top heavy, with three generals attending the first and two more generals attending the last. Fortunately, as aviators, they all speak pretty good English, so it’s easier to get various points across. “No problem” is a common phrase, but I think that’s just them trying to sound accommodating – some things are a real bono fide and actual problem, which is why they hired us.

But we solve problems like these all the time, so logistics have been the biggest problem. There are twelve of us on this traveling squad, so our ability to modify plans on the fly is severely curtailed. It also means a three vehicle convoy (we’re driving borrowed USG Expeditions) and an hour to check in and out of each hotel, which means slow going most of the time. No problem. After the second week, the bulk of the group will head home, and we should be down to a more manageably sized contingent.

Word of advice – avoid the restaurant at the Al Qassim Ramada. There is a line of schwarma shops just down the street who do a fine job. Visit them instead.

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Ants Shufflin'

This has been one of those field trips where someone eventually says, “You know, working twelve hours shifts is still just putting in half a day”, and the mild humor is acknowledged and everyone gets back to task.

What a week is been. Well, more than a week, but the contract did say eight days, so twelve should just about do it. Once we fly, though, I’ll get home and then it’ll be fourteen more days of beating on other people to produce, so I get a break from the self flagellation, and my domestic team gets to feel the sharp sting of my performance enhancing doughnuts.

[Mmmmm, flagellating doughnuts.]


The work this time is sort of confidential, so I won’t dwell on the details. Needless to write, it does involve lots of fully automatic weapons, an evil plot to take over the world and a hollowed out volcano. But that’s all I’m saying about that.

Meanwhile, back at our temporary digs in the 12,000 square foot villa,…

No shit. It’s huge, with seven bedroom suites, nine bathrooms, servants quarters, and a kitchen that could feed 200. It’s a Company place located immediately adjacent to the office, which is in a villa exactly the same, but the mirror image, and the office villa is full of cubicals. The office still has the nine bathrooms and monster kitchen. In the office kitchen, by the way, the Egyptian nationals on our staff have to wait to cook their lunch until after the Indians have cooked theirs, otherwise, the spices clash too much for anyone’s taste.

In the residence, we use the microwave, if anything, and the kettle, but that’s about the extent, as we eat most all of our meals at the restaurants within walking distance. I’d like to use the pool but, for reasons unbeknownst, we only clean the office pool, and we don’t have keys to that building.

The local restaurants are nice, but they aren’t particularly local. Mostly, we go to the Traders Hotel just down the street, or one of the upscale places at the small shopping mall next to it. At each, we get to eat outside, which is a real plus while the weather is still relatively cool. My favorite meal, though, was at a local Lebanese place in downtown Abu Dhabi where, for 20 AED, maybe five bucks, I received a plate piled high with meat shawarma, fresh flatbread, tabouli, hummus, a plate of fresh vegetables, and a Fanta. Sadly, it’s a half hour or more to get there, parking is awful, and we really don’t have the time.

Mostly, we get up at 0600, go to the office, meet with the client mid morning for a couple of hours, return to the office, leave at 1900 for supper, work until 2200. Rinse, lather, repeat. We got to the site on the second day, about 90 minutes away and pretty much in the middle of the desert. We used the LTC’s Range Rovers to move about the site (as our Galant would have been bogged down in the first little bits of sand). I think he really enjoyed getting off road, as there was no valid project reason to blast over as many sand dunes as he did, or to chase that herd of camel.

We used our “free” weekend Friday to drive to Dubai to see the sights. The tourist activity, however, was continuously tempered by the need to view these sights in the context of the fake city we’re planning to build, so most of the day was work. We saw the Burj Khalifa up close, but didn’t spend the money to take the tour. It’s really, really tall, but that’s about it.

We examined the local elevated rail, which required an 8 station train ride, and a walk through two of the region’s largest shopping malls. One had an indoor ski slope which, next to war, is about the dumbest thing I have ever seen (and I’ve met my Congressman). By and large, they were really, really big, but that’s about it. The train was very modern.

Of course, everything in the UAE is modern, as it was entirely built since the mass extraction of crude began in the latter half of the last century. There’s a sometimes fine, and sometimes monstrously large line between modern and tasteful, and this line is a blur to the local architects. Their attitude seems to be that, if it doesn’t look good when it’s done, we’ll just tear it down and build a new one. Likewise with cars – if I get a scratch on my Rolls, I’ll just trade it in on a Bentley.

This is a place like no other. The amount of wealth is staggering. Fine cars. Fine hotels. Immense construction. Everything is shiny and new, yet there is no sense that any of it is productive. It’s a vastly more consumption based economy than the States although, in the Emiratis defense, they can afford it. I get the feeling, though, that once the oil gets used up, everything will dry up with it. The first president here recognized the fleeting nature of money and constructed infrastructure. He planted and irrigated tress, built highways, and spread the wealth around to the locals. The next generation constructed large buildings and edifices. Their children, only now starting to move up into positions of responsibility, don’t seem all that responsible. You can see them at the malls, strolling about, looking bored, largely purposeless.

Once the wells are all tapped out, I suppose they can get jobs herding goats again. Once the wells are all tapped out, there won’t be power plants or desalination stations. Once the wells are tapped out, this will all be a desert again, and all of my work here over the past decade will be buried in sand.

Cool.

Until then, work follows the money, so this won’t be my last trip to this end of the world.

Uncool.

Whatever. Cats gotta eat. Ants gotta shuffle.

Here’s the Draw Your Own Analogy section of the post:

The office villa and the residential villa are separated by a high concrete wall. The wall extends around the perimeter of each villa. To get from one location to the other requires three or four steps, manipulation of heavy iron gates, and a walk of about 30 meters. I’ve recently noticed that along the sidewalk, next to the wall, is a narrow strip, devoid of dust, and populated by a steady stream of ants moving in each direction, from the yard internal to one villa to the yard internal to the other.
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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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