Meet the New General Manager

Foolish Lebanese in KSA
B’stard left the company for pastures new a few months after I joined. I was somewhat relieved. He was replaced by a strange Lebanese guy who seemed to take a shine to me. When he arrived in Riyadh he was given a room for one night only at the Al Khozama Hotel. But when he tried to check-out the next morning the hotel insisted that he pay the bill. He explained that they should invoice Bongo, and they explained that Mr Bongo no longer had credit facilities with the hotel. So the Lebanese guy refused to leave the hotel and stayed there for about three days while Bongo scraped together the cash to pay the ever-increasing bill.

So not an auspicious start for our new GM. After a few days he came to me and asked where was all the nightlife, the fun, the cinemas, the theatre? When I had stopped laughing and picked myself up off the floor, I said ‘you’re joking right?’ He said he wasn’t. I said ‘how can you not know that these things don’t exist in Saudi Arabia?’

He didn’t last long.