Friday, November 20, 2009

Another Moving Day in Abu Dhabi - A Cautionary Tale

Dateline Abu Dhabi - November 2009


Along about the 3rd of November we (Marco, my flat-mate and I) got a call from Shamail Shardan - he's the tenant we have been sub-renting from in Abu Dhabi.

The flat is a very nicely designed, well-laid out two-bedroom 5th floor flat on Al Falah St. (also know as Passport Rd. or 9th street, depending on who you talk to), corner Airport Rd. We were quite happy, looking forward to at least another year there. The rent was reasonable for the area (AED 150K/yr, about US$40K).

Noisy neighborhood, with three mosques in easy shouting (and they do!) distance, and constant traffic noise, almost like the Ocean Beach white-noise in San Francisco - but with more horns. I tuned it out after a while. Marco used ear plugs.

Parking is a pain in the ass, if you have any sense of entitlement about parking space - but you get used to it; used to just cruising slowly around the neighborhood's tightly packed interior mazes until you see something no one else has spotted (a 4X4 comes in handy in this respect on occasion) or until someone leaves. Thing about there being a vast number of cars around is that there is also a vast number of people, and the more people there are the greater the likelihood that someone, at any given moment, is heading off somewhere.

Anyhow, back to the phone call from Shamail: He'd been texting and calling repeatedly throughout the day, but my private mobile was switched off due to this being the week we rolled out the new document control procedures and systems I've been working on since January, and besides meetings and the usual work load there were a zillion details that needed attention. I finally picked up a rather distressed message from him, asking me to call him back ASAP. I could only imagine one possible cause for the sound in his voice.

Apparently the landlord, or the "owner representative", property manager - whatever - pieced together the fact that A.) Shamail had not been living in the building, and B.) we had (as had others before us). This was not provided for in the contract, and Shamail was given two options: Either move back in immediately, or vacate the premises. We were given until the 15th of the month to move.

Ugh! Timing couldn't have been worse, given relatively tight finances, heavy work load, along with the fact that we had just moved in in July. What can one do, though, but try to roll with it? Next day I mentioned the situation to a colleague at work, who reminded me about an email we all got a few weeks earlier about some flats the company was trying to get for employees in the Tourist Club area. After a couple emails and a phone call or two, it became clear this was a good option - similar price, brand new building, underground parking, relatively quite neighborhood. Good windows blocking nearly all external noise.

Papers were signed, monies moved, authorities, utilities contacted, moving company engaged - looked like everything was falling easily into place. Since the movers do all packing, disassembly and reassembly of furniture, removal and renstallation of shelves - we remained pretty relaxed to the last.
Moving day dawned beautiful, warm and sunny, with cool delicious breezes - and went straight downhill from there.


The downhill bit was about Shamail, mainly. He texted me on Friday, the day before the move, that he had sent a message to the property manager/owner representative informing him that we would be moving the stuff out the next day, Saturday the 14th, ahead of schedule, our instructions having been to be out by Sunday the 15th. On Thursday, the moving company manager called to confirm that the move was going ahead as planned, which I duly confirmed. Then on Friday, the building owner's rep replied to Shamail's message saying that we were NOT to move anything out until Shamail came by their office, in person. They didn't say why, and Shamail had been unable to reach them. So Friday afternoon Shamail let me know that we shouldn't move anything. BUT -the movers were coming in the morning and I couldn't call them off at that point. Shamail said he would be at the rep's office the next morning at 8:00 and would call me the minute he had things cleared up.

It seems Shamail had been under their scrutiny for a while since it had become apparent that he wasn't living there (even before we moved in). So they wanted him to come and sign an agreement that he would either move out entirely (which would let them put the place on the market at the current value (over $200K/yr) or move back in himself.

Saturday, 9AM: The movers arrived - no word from Shamail. My executive decision: "Start packing!" Then began a frenetic, seemingly chaotic storm of boxes and tape and plastic and more tape, and more tape after that. These guys are a pack of mad tapers. They taped the caps on all the bottles in the fridge. Like a bunch of insane spiders in a room full of bugs. By 10AM there were mostly only a whole bunch of packages ready to go - and still no word from Shamail. Maybe an hour 'til there would be nothing left to pack. I had called him maybe twenty-five times by now and sent a dozen text messages. I had no other way of reaching him. I started to panic. Now, we not only couldn't move anything out, all our stuff was unavailable, wrapped in neat cocoons.

Another exective decision: I went to talk to the owner's rep myself. This was when I learned that Shamail (in the opinion of the rep) had been regarded as a bit shady in his dealings with them. I explained that the furniture was not Shamail's, but mine, since I had bought it all from him - didn't matter. The condition remained: No clearance granted, nothing moves, until Shamail settled things with them.

I contemplated just telling the movers to go ahead anyway, but they had been told by building security they were not allowed to take anything out until the clearance letter was in hand. Any attempt to move anything would certainly have resulted in police intervention.

What to do?! At this point I was imagining the worst: Shamail had decided to abandon the place and everything in it, maybe he was afraid of legal consequences for his subletting activities, maybe he had left the country... I had flashbacks of friends Alpa and Guarav's nightmare, and other horror stories of expats (not in Kansas anymore!) stuck in foreign jails, sent to Siberia - you get the picture. I was baffled that I could have so completely misjudged this guy, who I had always had a REALLY good feeling about. I was thinking - another life lesson is in the making - I wonder how it'll come out - what is the moral of this story, I wondered?

The moving crew supervisor had a suggestion: Call Shamail from a different phone. Took me a minute to realize why he was suggesting this - but eventually I got it, as you may already have. If he was dodging me, he might answer a call from a phone he didn't recognize. I tried, and he did. I was immediately relieved and pissed, and shattered by the nearly inescapable conclusion that he HAD been trying to duck me, which eroded the little confidence I had left that he had honorable intentions.

As it turned out, however, he had (probably owing to the stress of the situation) been out very late the night before partying, and was just waking up. I was furious - but the funny thing is that I couldn't really stay that way for long. People here don't respond to anger the way they do in the US (dangerous generalization of course). They don't play the defensive confrontation game so much. Shamail was good natured and understanding and said he was on his way from Al Ain, but it'd take some time, maybe an hour and a half. He'd call the office and try to get them to give clearance. I felt a little better, but by now the movers were getting antsy - they were supposed to be finished by 3PM and they hadn't starting loading things out yet. I went back to chewing my fingernails. I went down to talk to the security gaurd eventually, and asked him to please call the office to see if they had talked to Shamail. He did, and after quite a lengthy conversation, none of which I could understand, he said "ok, ok you moving now".

So we did.

The movers were (and probably still are) a little barbaric, but they got the job done. I let them try to put away the kitchen goods (in a much smaller kitchen with much less cupboard space), using their own judgement, while I was doing other things, and found that they didn't have any. Judgement, that is. It's really interesting how people's minds work. But I guess one can't really expect anyone to think like one does.

At the point when I started writing this, things were settling down over the days following the move, we were starting to get confortable - things getting organized and put away properly. Still don't have the gas connected in the kitchen, and the cable isn't connected yet. We went to Ikea and Marco bought a bed, desk and dresser, I got a desk for my room - they'll be delivered in three weeks. The kitchen needs shelves and a spice rack. The refrigerator is too big to fit in the space available for it in the kitchen (oops!) so it's next to the dining table in the little dining area (pix soon to come). I'll probably sell it (it's pretty new, a nice size and in good shape) and get one that fits the kitchen. Oh, and we had curtains made - very quick and relatively cheap. At the end of the moving day, around 8:30, we called a curtain company, they came, measured the rooms, and went away again. They were ready the next night - floor-to-ceiling pull-cord drapes with "belts", good fabric, for three rooms, installed, for about $700.

OK, so our trajectory, Marco's and mine, was set to perfecting our "nest" and enjoying it as much as possible over the next year - at which point some adjustments would have had to have been made, probably. BUT (did you notice the subtle shift to the past tense in there) - yesterday Marco dropped the bomb that was dropped on him: He has been "made redundant" - the etymology is traceable to British corporate-speak (as prevalent or more so here in the Middle East than its American cousin), and is a euphemism for "sacked", "fired", "let go", "terminated". Twelve architects and engineers who were "under-utilized" in their respective departments have gotten pink slips. He is understandably upset, and feels unjustly treated, since, in his view, the chopping block should had first seen the heads of the higher level leads who have failed to provide work for the teams by not winning bids.

The situation is likely a bit more complex, but I tend to agree - the people in charge of proposals and bids, who earn much higher salaries, should be accountable for their performance. Firing a couple of poor performers (who happen to be politically astute enough to hold on to their jobs while their staff are sacrificed) at the middle-management level would probably save the company more money, and leave it better prepared to deal with the work that a better performing replacement manager would be able to drum up. This appears to be one of the deeply entrenched cultural flaws of the top-down hierarchy of corporate structure.

Anyway, the situation is what it is - Marco is going, and I'm very, very sad about it.

Side note: Marco is the Oscar Madison to my Felix Unger - although Marco is not really sloppy at all, I am more on top of houselhold organization than he is, and much more detail oriented - "anal" if you like, at least in our situation. We've gotten along SO well for the past year that I'm really not looking forward to trying to find a new flat mate - but there's not really a choice. Marco kicked in what amounts to nine months rent up front, which is money I can't give him back until I find one, since the move meant I had to take pretty much everything out of savings to cover the full year in advance.

I'm hopeful, based on past experience, that we'll both look back on this at some point and chuckle, and wonder at the working of events that necessitated this change of course and at the internal mechanisms that allow humans to adapt to changing circumstances, and thrive on the new ones that arise. For now my good cheer at having coped with yet another dislocation is definitely tempered by the fact that someone who has grown to be a good friend will very likely be out of direct reach and oriented in a direction that will likely take us on vastly separate paths. But then I must remind myself (for the how-many-th time): What do I know? I haven't got a freaking clue what's coming - so let's just wait and see.

Cautionary Note: Subletting in Abu Dhabi? Bad idea. MUCH better to do things here by the book - as much as possible, anyhow, while still striving to maintain integrity with one's internal compass.

Also, yet again - leaping to conclusions about other people behavior, in my estimation and esperience, is just not a good idea. The brain will attempt to make sense out of the apparent chaos out there, and will persistently assemble patterns to explain things (like Shamail's failure to call or show up at the appointed hour); patterns that almost always fail to represent reality. Especially in extreme situations - the mind is a dangerous neighborhood - almost as dangerous as the heart. Take a breath. Relax. Wait and see.

Coby Smolens