ADVENTURES IN DUBAI: YOUR FAVOURITE NUMBER ONE BLOG BRITISH DESIGNER LIVING IN DUBAI TELLS (NEARLY) ALL
Friday, November 23, 2007
Leaving Dubai
I don't think I ever did do a post about our last few days in Dubai, so here goes.
The essential things that we had to accomplish were: 1) Sell/get rid of most of the furniture 2) Sell the car 3) Shut down our Etisalat (phone/internet monopolist) accounts 4) Shut down our DEWA (electricity/water monopolist) account 5) Be ready for the packers/shippers 6) Have a little rest 7) Leave
1) The second-hand stuff market in Dubai is controlled by Pakistani dealers. They will plead poverty and say that no-one wants to buy the kind of stuff we are selling (nearly all IKEA stuff in excellent condition), and offer you a couple of Euros for each item. When you have spat on your hand and agreed the deal, they pull out their wallet to pay you, at which point they see you looking at their huge wad and feel obliged to tell you that they never go anywhere with less than 50,000 Dirhams (€9200), in case they have to buy a car. Bastards, snakes, Sindhis probably*.
2) Selling the car was problematic. I got quite a lot of responses from my advertising, but the damn car could tell something was going on and kept breaking down to try to stop me selling it. In the last week we had: a flat tyre (I never had a wrench that was the right size, so it needed to be taken to the fixers), overheating engine (water pump or something), and finally, just as we were about to drive it to the Traffic Department to complete the ownership transfer formalities, a loose cable on the underside (the guy who was buying it and his buddy are both aircraft engineers - they said the cable was responsible for the changing of the gears: I could have driven it to the Traffic Department, but only in first gear).
So we went to the Traffic Department without the car. This was close to closing time on a Thursday evening. They would not be opening again until Sunday morning, and BetterArf and I were flying out on Saturday night. It comes to our turn in the queue and they tell us that the car needs a new roadworthiness test. I explain that it passed this test only five weeks ago and they say, no, it's a new rule, whenever you transfer ownership of a car, it has to have a fresh test.
Bugger, the car is actually undriveable at this point, and also about fifteen kilometres away. We go to see the facility manager. He is very understanding, and says we can all sign the documents, and the other guys can bring the car and its test certificate on Sunday and finish it off. So, they pay me the balance, express certain doubts about this guy keeping his word (he is a UAE national, they are Sri Lankan, make of that what you will), we exchange email addresses, and hope and pray that this will work out (they sent me an email a few days later: it did work out).
3) Packing day was the 5th of July. Once the packers had arrived, I tootled down to Etisalat in Jebel Ali to shut down my landline, ADSL and mobile accounts. This proved to be much harder than I had expected. The Etisalat billing system was down. No problem, I said, I can check my balances on the Public Cash Payment Machines. No, said the guy, it won't be accurate. Meaning, any outstanding balance will be till 3am this morning, but I might have spent all morning on the phone to my auntie in Australia, and that won't be shown on the outstanding balance until tomorrow. The system in their office is real-time. But it's down. Fecking hell. I couldn't wait around at their office all day until the system came up again. I tried to pay a bit more than the balances we get from the machine, but the guy said he couldn't accept it. So I paid the exact amount, and if I ever move back to the UAE and try to open accounts with Etisalat, they will insist on being paid the outstanding balance.
They did this to me once before - after my first job in Dubai went to ratshit, I left for a bit. Before I left, I tried to pay off all my bills, but they were unable to determine the outstanding amount on my Internet dial-up account. So it kept on going with some kind of monthly rental charge, and by the time I had returned and tried to open new accounts they insisted that I pay them Dhs 700 (€129) to cover the cost of a service that they had not provided and I had obviously not used. Bastardos!
4) I went to the DEWA (electricity/water company) office a couple of weeks before our departure to find out what the score was with final bills etc. I discovered that I could book the disconnection for a certain date/time, and collect/pay the final bill the next day. This would have been cool, because I expected that they would owe me money in the form of a partial refund of my Dhs 1,000 (€184) security deposit.
So I booked the disconnection for 5pm on the 4th July. We were staying at a friend's flat by then, so no power at night was not a problem: we'd also checked with the packers: they would do their work the next day whether there was a/c or not.
When we arrived back at the flat on the morning of the fifth, we still had power (the switches and meters for the power supply live in a room down the hall - DEWA do not need to enter the flat to read the meter/disconnect the supply). Bugger.
The DEWA guy turned up just as all the packing was finished: he said he had disconnected it the day before, and wanted to know who had put it on again. All very odd, and it meant that we could not get a final bill before leaving Dubai. I had phoned them a few times during the day, and got responses like 'what's the rush' and 'what do you expect me to do about it?' DEWA have a few gazillion miles to go in terms of customer service.
5) Global Relocations (the packers/shippers) turned up at the appointed time, and did their work efficiently. I was a bit disappointed that they had no kind of trolley with them (there were some heavy things that we needed to get rid of, and wheels would have been useful: in the end we bribed the guys a bit to carry them out). But everything was wrapped and packed securely (not a single broken item at the Madrid end!). They could have maybe used a few fewer rainforests-worth of paper in packing the kitchen stuff, and the three rolls of bubble-wrap (weight: zero, volume 0.25 cubic metre) should not have been sent! The point here is that the shipping cost is based on volume rather than weight, so our estimated 6-8 cubic metres became about 15 when it was all packed. That really fucked our budget.
Throughout the day we were taking out stuff that was not to be shipped and leaving it out for anybody who wanted it. BetterArf called the security guys to tell them it was all there for the taking - it was interesting to see the pecking-order amongst the guys who turned up.
And just as we were about to leave, our new next-door neighbour showed up. He was happy to take some of the plants. It turns out he has a small-holding in Andalucia and occasionally has to come to Dubai to do some work. Small world eh?
Finally, it was done: I had expected that it would have been finished by about 1pm, but it was actually 5pm by the time they finished: too late to do a proper handover with the landlord. The weekend was upon us.
6) Our stuff is packed and on its way. Now to meet the guys who are buying my car at the Traffic Department. This is the point where we realise that there's something dangling and clicking on the road under the car (see item 2). Park the car, call the guys, and wait.
BetterArf takes a cab down to the Landlord's office to hand in the documents - they finish at 3pm on a Thursday so she stuffs notes through their letterbox.
The indefatiguable car-buyers arrive about an hour later. They lift up the car and have a wriggle underneath it, but need some special tools to fix it. No worries, we all jump into their car and head off to item 2. After the Traffic Department, we head, exhausted, to our sanctuary. Amazingly, the lovely, lovely Sri Lankans who have insisted on buying my broken-down car despite all of the problems, take us there - there's obviously something magical about my ex-car that I failed to appreciate but which they prize highly. Possibly it's the red paint-job. Or the furry dice.
So, sanctuary; one of BetterArf's colleagues is putting us up for a couple of nights in deepest Jumeirah. They say that moving house is one of lifes most stressful experiences, on a par with bereavement and divorce. They are wrong: this was worse than anything! I was so exhausted that I can't remember what we did that night. Ate a bit, drank a bit, slept a lot, I suppose.
7) And so we left. We had, for the first time, forsaken Dubai Airport: we were booked on Abu Dhabi-based Etihad. I'd heard nothing but good reports about this airline, and their fares were the best around. You can check-in your luggage at their office on Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai up to (I think) 24 hours before your flight, and take a luxury coach from there to Abu Dhabi Airport. Absolutely bloody fantastic. It can easily take you an hour to drive/taxi to Dubai Airport - depending on traffic; it could be a shitload more and you are always at risk of missing your flight. To Abu Dhabi Airport, it's a virtually guaranteed 45 minutes. The flight was grand, marred only by the fact that the destination was Heathrow, the first-world's worst airport bar none.
Do I miss Dubai? Hardly at all. I do miss my buddies, really I do. And I miss the girl who used to come in and do our mountains of ironing. I miss having an apartment that was big enough to live in and accommodate guests - but next year we will get a bigger one. On the upside, we have proper weather that changes throughout the year, we live in a supremely civilized country, we have a King who tells dickheads like Chavez to 'shut up', we have public transport that works, we have freedom of speech and action, we have democracy, we have a government that doesn't need to launch PR things like 'Dubai Cares' - in general the 'caring' is built into the system, we have so much art and culture that it is difficult to keep up with it all. What we have here is real life. And not a small amount of what BetterArf would describe as 'yabadabadoo'.
I'm still lovin' it.
*This may or may not be racist: but I have met both Indians and Pakistanis who've said 'you trust a Sindhi like you trust a snake'. So nerr.
You may have noticed that my blogging has been a bit infrequent of late. I put this down to a combination of various phenomena: TBTB (Too Busy To Blog), INWP (Interweb Not Working Properly) and CBA (Can't Be Arsed). CBA is a subset of INWP.
If you've been paying attention, you'll know that what Itisalot laughingly call my 'broadband' connection at home has not been working properly for months now. A long visit by an Itisalot 'engineer' only made matters worse. The technician uninstalled my Norton Internet Security and downloaded AVG. After an hour or so of scanning the gazillion files on my laptop, AVG found a worm The technician said that that was the culprit - all I had to do was wait for the scan to finish and let AVG kill the worm and all would be well. Well, it wasn't.
A few days later I re-installed Windoze. The only effect that this had was that every time I boot-up (what an appropriate phrase) the laptop, it tells me it's found a new PCI controller and an Ethernet card. It can't install the software for them, of course, because these devices are already installed. I can no longer connect to the InterWeb at my office: when I'm working there I have to throw files onto a memory stick to transfer them to another PC that is connected to the net. Arse pain in the it is.
And at home I still cannot use FTP, nor can I connect to https:// sites. But worst of all, I cannot log on to Blogger to post my lovely blogs! So I have to do the memory stick thing to my old laptop. Arse pain in the it is.
So the prospects of me having to do a complete re-format of my laptop looms large. Actually if I'm going to do that I might think about getting Windows Vista, although I'm told that one result of that could be that some of my software might not work any more. Hmmm. Probably not then.
Thanks to all the commenters on the previous post who advised to get a Mac.I'm sure I could break one o' those too.
I had a brainwave the other day: why not resurrect my old laptop and see if FTP works on that? So I did, and it did, mostly. There's a few sites that it cannot connect to but it can connect to sites that I'm working on now. So, for working at home I now have my new laptop that I do the work on, my old laptop with its non-functional screen beside me, connected to a 17" monitor that is sitting on a chair because I don't think our glass-topped dining table would take the weight. So when I need to upload a file (this only happens about 500 times a day) I copy it onto a memory stick, plug the stick into the old laptop, swap the LAN cable from the new machine to the old one (reminder to self: get another long LAN cable), and then do the upload and swap the chip and cable back to the new machine. It's an almighty pain in the ass, but it works for now.
On the mobile phone front, I bought the cheapest phone I could find: a neat little black Motorola for a paltry Dhs 99! Sadly, it would only offer SOS/emergency service. Ping! went a thought in my head. Maybe I should pay the bill, it's that time of the month (although the Interweb and landline were still working so it would be a bit odd for them to just disconnect the mobile). First thing the next morning I go to Itisalot in Gerbil Alley, and before handing over any cash I ask a clerk whether I've been disconnected. No, he says, not yet. Ah, so why do I only get SOS service on this phone? He asks me how long I've had my SIM card, and I have no idea - 7, 8, 9 years? Ah, he says, it'll be worn out. You need a replacement: dhs 50. Surely, I say, it should be free: it's not my fault it's worn out! But, he says, you've been using it for 789 years haven't you? Hmm, can't win against Itisalot.
So I fill in the form for a replacement SIM card, wait in a queue for a bit, and get the new one. The guy says it will be active in half an hour. Actually it was activated 10 minutes later when I got a flurry of voicemail alerts.
My apologies for the complete lack of blogging for almost a fortnight, I’ve been having serious problems with my laptop and the Interweb.
I blogged earlier about my problem with using FTP from my ‘broadband’ connection at home. After two weeks of whingy emails from me, Itisalot finally sent an engineer to have a look. Of course, when he plugged in his laptop, everything was fine. His conclusion was that I might have a virus on my machine, so he downloaded AVG and set it off on a mighty scan. I have gazillions of files and after two hours it was only halfway through the scan, although it had found a worm by then. The engineer took that as his cue to leave, saying ‘it will work after the scan is finished’. Hmm, well no, it bloody well didn’t work. And he had not explained to me why it works just fine using my Media City connection.
I had forgotten about the clever Windows feature known as System Restore. This lets you roll back the configuration of your system to a point where you know things were working fine. I decided to do a restore to a few days before I had the FTP problem. It made no difference, but it did stop the Interweb from working at the office.
DMC’s IT dude had a play with it and got nowhere.
Then I thought it would be a bright idea to re-install Windows. I had forgotten, of course, that when you do this you lose all the emails and the address book that you have built up over the years, and the Registry forgets about all the software you have installed. The software is still there, but the computer no longer knows where to find it so you have to install everything again.
Re-installing Windows did not have the desired effect. FTP was still not working and wi-fi is totally buggered. I can connect using a LAN cable at home, but not at the office. Strangely the computer tells me, with great delight, that it has found some new hardware every time I boot up. I offer the drivers for the Ethernet Controller, but it declines to take them because that device is already installed.
So, my Interweb is muxed ip big time. I cannot even access the Blogger edit page from home right now, and when I’m at the office I don’t have time to do any posting.
I cannot begin to describe how frustrating this is. It looks like I’ll be doing a format c:/ on the beast(ard) this weekend and then re-installing all my software and files. And, as if that wasn’t enough shit, my bloody phone packed up three days ago. The Palm Treo 650 that was my pride and joy when I bought it almost 2 years ago, is now reduced to being a PDA without the phone facility. I cannot get a signal of any kind, no matter where I am. I did some research yesterday on cheapie mobiles: the cheapest one is a plasticky Motorola at Dhs 117. Next up is a blue plastic Nokia at dhs 130. I’ll have to get one of them, because nobody will touch a Palm in this country and to get one fixed you have to send it to Slovakia or Slovenia. Dammit.
And, and, and...I have the world's worst cold! Ah well, mustn't grumble.
The papers today are awash with stories related to telecoms: Emirates Toady headlines with a story about rumours of a third entrant into the retail market in the UAE. TRA denies all knowledge.
Gulf Snooze carries a couple of stories, one that says conventional telecoms companies need to embrace VOIP or die (I paraphrase). The other brings us the good news that du (the new telco, soon to start mobile operations) will be connecting TECOM to the proxy any day now and therefore that Media City's tagline 'Freedom to Create' becomes even more meaningless than it has been up till now. Interesting to note that du, the monopoly-breaker, will still have a monopoly within TECOM, Emaar and Nakheel properties. Du is 20% owned by TECOM Investments, who about a year ago took over SahmNet, Emaar's own telco. As TECOM is wholly-owned by Dubai Holdings (who also own propery developer Nakheel), they are given preference in supplying telecoms infrastructure to all new Nakheel developments.
Of course, it is not fresh news that the Broxy will be imposed on TECOM (collectively Dubai Internet City, Dubai Media City and Knowledge Vamlet). But what is interesting is the disingenuous tosh used to justify it. Gulf News says:
Asked why users were not free to choose what sites they visit, Mohammad Al Ghanem, director general of the TRA, said the TRA was not out to "police" the citizenry of the UAE.
"We are not inventing a procedure or a process," he told Gulf News. "This is implemented in every single country but with different limits and different categorisations."
Mr Al Ghanem, that is not an answer...
Al Ghanem said the TRA desired to avoid any negative impacts on businesses residing within the free zones, and promised exemptions for companies with a legitimate interest in keeping unfettered internet access.
Breaking with the commonly perceived notion that the free zones had their own sets of telecommunications laws, [Mohammad Al Gaith, the TRA's manager for technical affairs] said the reason the free zones weren't previously covered under the filter was technical, not jurisdictional.
New telecom operator du provides Internet service in the free zones, and problems had arisen over implementing the proxy filter over du's network.
Mr Al Ghaith, I have been a tenant at Dubai Media City since shortly after its inception 6 years ago. I can tell you that the reason these free zones were not previously proxied was neither technical nor jurisdictional. It was a deliberate decision by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum who, in his wisdom, realised that these entities would not be very attractive to potential international clients if their Internet access was censored. That reason is still valid today
Can somebody please explain to me why the Telecoms Regulation Authority thinks it is fit to tell me, or any other Internet user, what sites we can and cannot visit? I know there is a cultural thing with the locals and some others, but surely if they want a restricted Internet then they can request and be given that. For everyone else, we pay more than twice as much for Internet access than anywhere else in the real world, and I think you, the TRA, should respect that and let us have (more or less) unfettered access.
I am sick to death of being treated like a child by these people. Apart from anything else, their obsessive, frequently unreasonable, often illogical blocking of millions of websites, including some of the world's most popular (Flickr again) makes me cringe with embarrassment. We are supposed to be the most free of all Gulf States, but we block Flickr because some wastafarian tells us to.
I despair. And my FTP and HTTPS are still not working.
OK, Keefieboy, try to be calm. Don't bash those keys too hard, you'll be needing them when you leave this wonderful country. Deep breath .................. innn....................... outttt ...................innn ....................... outtt.
OK. I'm calm. I'm CALM!!!
For the last week I have been having a problem with my Etisalat Al-Shamil ('broadband') connection from my mansion. The problem is that I can no longer use FTP. You don't want to know this, but FTP is File Transfer Protocol - a thing that allows you to upload and download files to and from web servers. It's pretty essential if you design websites like what I do. The problem is that I can connect to various servers, but once connected I cannot change folders or upload/download files. Why? Well, some of my research on the web suggested this was symptomatic of a firewall problem. Somewhere in the chain of computers between my labtob and the web server, a little pox is saying 'computer says no'.
So, with the greatest reluctance, I called the Itisalot Call Center in Ajmaaaaan. I say reluctance because many years of experience have taught me that they have a very limited range of responses available to them, namely: 1) 'Your computer is misconfigured, please format your hard drive.' or 2) 'There is something wrong with your server.'
So we go through that and then I request a phone number for someone who actually knows something about the Itisalot Interweb network. No can do, says the boy on the phone: 'send an email to mailto:help@itisalot.ae. Yeah, right. So I did.
To my absolute and utter amazement I got a phone call from someone who sounded like he knew what he was talking about. Admittedly he did go through the usual 'it's not our fault' routine, but I feel like we are making progress of a kind. But not fast enough.
In the intervening days I've provided this guy with Traceroutes of my connection attempts to various servers in the UK and US. I have suggested to him that it may be a firewall problem. I have told him that I can successfully use FTP from my office in Media City, so configuration of my laptop and of the servers concerned is absolutely ruled out. So now we are at a stage where they are on the verge of admitting that they have a problem, and he's trying to get a meeting together with various departments to sort it out.
Bravo!
The other day I realised that we (BetterArf and moi) have a related problem, and we've had this one for quite a while. We cannot easily access 'https://' domains from our house. This means that e-commerce transactions almost always fail, it takes forever for me to use Red Triangles' online banking, and BetterArf cannot access her work email from here.
So, enough of the Sherlock Holmes. I just thought I'd try something. Forget about Etisalat's restrictive and ill-configured infrastructure, I'll try my own. I have servers in the UK. I set up a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to one of them. This means that anything I send or receive comes straight from that server without any of the intervening Itisalot stuff getting in the way.
Bingo!
FTP worked straight off! And much faster than it's ever worked through the Broxy. But, the Interweb fell over. So it helps if I need to do an emergency out-of-hours upload, but not if I want to visit my bank or playboy.com.
Itisalot (sorry, Etisalat, you might not recognise our little jokey name for you), I hope you read and understand this post. It tells you two things
1) The Proxy screws everything up and everyone with more than half a brain hates it and
2) Stop your Call Center staff from always assuming that the problem is at the customer's end. Because more often than not, it isn't.
Our belovéd Telecoms Regulation Authority has just announced that we have until December to sort out our mobile phone books. Currently, all mobile numbers in the UAE have the prefix '050'. If you are calling a mobile number from another local mobile, you can drop the prefix. But from December, that prefix must be dialled. Partly this is because Itisalot is running out of capacity on 050, and they are going to introduce 056 if they get any new subscribers. And of course, du will need a prefix of its own.
I met somebody who works for du the other day. The conversation went something like this: du guy: Hi, my name is zzz and I work for du, and that's all I'm going to say about that. me: So I'm hearing that du could use another year or two before they launch? du guy: zzzzip. me: ?? du guy:
Hmm. I actually sent an email to du at the end of September, explaining that I had been under the impression they would launch by the end of September and wondering what was actually happening. Sadly I have not had a reply yet. Neither has 7Days, who were getting themselves into a bit of a strop about it a while ago. Anyhoo, the current zeitgeist says they'll get something on the market by the end of this year. But really they'll need two or three years to get their act together. I'm disappointed by the current radio silence: they started off well, but have been completely absent recently. This does not inspire confidence.
No doubt you lucky lucky beoble who live in the UAE and are hostages of Etisalat will have been invited to do their annual 'Hostage Satisfaction Survey'. And you've probably thought 'I can't be bothered - the questions are always phrased so that whatever you say makes it look like you actually like Etisalat'. That's what I thought, but then I had a look at it and I have to say it's better than previous years; your options are no longer limited to a range of 'quite good' through to 'excellent', they now have a ten-point scale that goes from 'terrible' to 'outstanding' or words to that effect. And there are free-text boxes dotted around where you can write an essay telling them how great or how crap you think they are.
I was a bit stumped on the satisfaction rating for the proxy though: the question is 'How IMPORTANT the following network and other related aspects for an Internet service are to you?...Internet Filtering/ Content Blocking (feature by which the ISP blocks certain websites)' and the answer options go from 'not important at all' to 'extremely important' - it's very hard to answer that when what you want to say is '99% of censorship is immoral and a contravention of basic human rights so please go burn your damned proxy'.
And it was interesting to see a number of questions asking about the possibility that you may be thinking of switching to an alternative supplier.
Etisalat - this survey is a brave but hopelessly belated attempt at pretending that you give a damn what your hostages think. But you already know that you've lost the vast majority of your hostage base even before the new operator starts operations. You have acted as smug and callous monopolists for as long as I have lived in this country. You have bled us dry.
Etisalat yesterday unblocked a bunch of big-name websites. Things like youtube, hi5, orkut, myspace, friendsreunited etc.
We are supposed to be grateful.
Although Etisalat has made no official comment on the unblocking as yet, there is speculation that it has something to do with the impending launch of rival telco du. And while some insiders are saying that du is unlikely to be 'better' than Etisalat, I'm inclined to wonder how they could actually be worse.
Plenty of sites are still blocked, however, and some are suffering from terminal tcp_errors - this is Etisalat's other kind of blocking strategy where you don't actually get to see the light blue screen of censorship...
you just get this...
Which makes you think that the site is not actually blocked, there's just some kind of technical problem that might go away if you come back later. Except it doesn't go away. This strategy is still applied to flickr.com and clickatell.com. Clickatell is interesting because it doesn't 'contravene the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the UAE', it's simply a competitor to Etisalat's overpriced SMS service.
I went to perform my patriotic duty this morning by paying my monthly visit to the gatherer of taxes.
I went to pay my phone and Internet bills this morning. I was expecting great things of Etisalat, seeing as how just last week they won an award for Best Customer Service in the UAE. And it's Ramadan, so everyone should be super-nice.
There was a small huddle around one of the cash payment machines, but the other had no queue. I fiddled around with it for a bit, and soon discovered the reason for its queuelessness. It wasn't working. So I joined the huddle for the other machine, which had grown a little bit (the huddle, not the machine). I stood in the queue for ten minutes, during which time the person at the front looked like he was about halfway through the sheaf of bills he was inputting.
So I stomped off to the cashier's desk and was about fifth in line. The cashier finished with the person he was dealing with, and turned the next one away because she had fewer than six bills. Buggrit! I left that queue and rejoined the cash machine queue, which by now was simply enormous. I must have had steam coming out of my ears because a security guard came up to me and suggested I use the other other machine. It's outside, round the back of the building, in a little lobby. Great. I get there. It's outside, round the back of the building, in a little lobby, in pieces.
Back to the main building. I noticed that the cashier had no customers now, so I approached him with my feeble list of three accounts. 'Cash machine' he said. I pointed out that a) only one out of the three machines was working, and b) he was doing nothing. 'Go see manager' he said.
I went to see the manager, pointed out that he had a problem, and wondered if Etisalat didn't want my money. 'Of course we want your money!' he said, so I suggested he might want to find a way to make it possible for me to give it to them. He had a quick look at the mess in the main hall and told Abdullah to be a cashier for a bit.
Abdullah donned a cashier's hat and did the business. He had no change, of course, so I ended up giving Etisalat a bit more than I wanted to.
My thanks to Grapeshisha for posting an English translation of the UAE's new cyber crimes law. I hope and pray that it is a bad translation, because it talks about issues that are very far removed from 'cyber crime'. Anyhoo, I quite like this clause...
Article No.5 of the law reads anyone convicted of hampering, blocking or preventing the reach of service or logging onto computer programmes, or information sources with any possible means whether via the use of internet or any information technology mean, shall be punished with a jail term, or a fine, or both.
So it's nearly the end of the month and of course I haven't bothered to pay Etisalat so the barftuds cut me off. So I trundle down to their shiny new office at Jebel Ali and get pounced upon by an over-eager East European lady. She won't let me go to the cashier, and forces me to use the cash payment machine. Observing my age she assumes I'm a techno-moron and insists on standing beside me and telling me which buttons to press.
Now, I've used these machines before, and they are very clever, but a pain in the butt when you have four accounts to deal with. This particular machine has seen better days: the screen has very low contrast, and it is positioned so that it reflects the main entrance doors and the bright sunny scene outside. I can barely see anything on the screen.
What I usually do with these machines if I'm paying several bills is to treat each one as a separate transaction. But I learned something today. If you press the button marked 'Select To Query', you can do multiple accounts! I point out to my companion that the phrase 'select to query' has no meaning in the English language - I certainly would not guess that it is supposed to mean anything like 'do another account'.
Anyhoo, we finally get to the screen where you decide how much you actually want to pay, I make a complete mess of it and then accidentally cancel everything. This debacle has taken almost ten minutes. I beg the woman to let me go to the cashier and she relents.
The cashier at his nice ergonomically designed workstation only has to tap in one of my phone numbers to get all of my accounts on his screen, decide the amounts, take the money and print receipts. Two minutes maximum.
Due to shortage of time I decline to give Etisalat the benefit of my wisdom as I pass the box marked 'Etisalat, are we any good?' on the way out.
Well, I can't say I wasn't warned. I had an email from Etisalat a few days ago advising me that Internet speeds 'might' be reduced for a week starting today. And the reason? None of the one's I'd previously guessed at. But it is a corker.
They are relocating three submarine cables that come ashore at Fujeirah because of the construction of an artificial island off the coast. Gulf News quotes Abdullah Hashim, Ecompany's Assistant General Manager as saying that they had put in extra links to minimize the disruption caused by the work.
"People might not even notice any difference. We will try to manage the traffic. Many operators would not do this work to lessen the effects, but customer service is very important to us," he said.
I'm noticing it now, and have been for about the last hour.
My thanks go to an anonymous reader for emailing me a heads-up about my previous post. It was displaying just fine on this main page, but if you tried to view it on its own, in the archive or to add a comment, it was blocked! I never thought I'd see the day. This article was only posted a few hours ago, and the supposition is that the combination of a synonym for 'no-cost' and a synonym for 'extremely warm' were to blame.
May I take this opportunity to extend my most humble apologies to Etisalat and, indeed, to the brave and noble population of the UAE for having offended their religious, cultural, political and moral values. And it only took two innocent little words to do it!
So I removed the offending words from the post, and instantly the page is available again. Which means that Etisalat have an extremely crude set of filters that look for banned words in page titles. Think I'll try a few experiments...
...a bit later. Right then, if your page title contains the phrase 'free hot', it triggers the 'site blocked' page. How chuffing pathetic is that?
What have they done now, our favourite (actually, still, our only) phone and interweb company? 1) Banned the use of Google Talk in Internet cafés
2) Launched a ludicrous mobile service for kids in association with SpaceToon Cartoon Channel.
Really, I simply cannot comprehend how the most advanced, ambitious, and otherwise liberal nation in the Arabian peninsula (that's us, the UAE) has got itself lumbered with the most restrictive, and, to quote Emarati 'Nazi' telecoms provider in the region.
I can undestand the monopoly aspect a bit. It seems that almost all countries start off with a monopoly telephone provider. The UK did (first the GPO, which was then spun off into BT, and God it was awful), the US did, Jordan, Saudi, Egypt, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait - you name it, that's how you start your telephone system. Probably because the initial investment in the network was so huge that private investors would not take the risk. But there comes a time when officially-sanctioned monopolies cease to work in the consumers' favour. I think the UAE reached this point about eight years ago.
But the Government were very very slow to act. It not only owns a controlling share in Etisalat, it also gets 50% of their annual profit as a royalty. It is said that this money is enough to pay the entire payroll of the UAE Federal Government. So in a way, using Etisalat services, and paying their extortionate charges is actually an indirect tax. And Etisalat is the largest employer of UAE nationals in the country. Under pressure from the WTO, a new telecoms provider, Du, has been set up. But guess what? It's 50% owned by the Government, and will still have to pay the 50% royalty...
So, high prices as a hard-to-spot form of taxation aside, what are we left with? Well, Etisalat seems to have set itself up as some kind of moral guardian of the nation. While I can fully understand that some locals might want to be protected against porn, pork, beer, Israel and any criticism of the country, that still leaves hundreds of thousands of websites that are wrongly blocked by Etisalat.
Whats bugs me most about this are sites that compete with Etisalat in some way, or that are only marginally connected to the moral, social and religious beliefs of the country. Things like Flickr - may contain breasts, FriendsReUnited - links to a dating site. But companies the world over that offer competing services, such as VOIP (Skype, Google Talk etc) and bulk SMS gateways are also blocked and this has absolutely nothing to do with the usual reasons for blocking: it is purely to do with Etisalat protecting its precious monopoly. Or to put it another way, denying choice to its customers.
The other dumb thing Etisalat did this week was to launch a mobile phone service that targets kids in the 6-12 age group. In collaboration with SpaceToon cartoon channel, kiddiewinkles will be able to download stuff and upload stuff, and Etisalat is trying to say that it is 'educational'. My ass. Most developed countries explicity forbid the direct targetting of very young kids by marketers for the simple reason that the kids don't know enough to make a judgment and if a TV ad tells them they have to have something then they will pester their parents until they get it. The parents, of course have to pay for it. In the case of this new abomination from Etisalat, they will have to pay, and pay, and pay, every month.
And as a follow-up, Emirates Today carried a front-page story today in which a senior Ministry of Education official said that the ban on mobile phones in public and private schools may be lifted because 'mobile phones can be used for educational purposes'. (Can't link to the story in the Toady 'cos of their lousy website, sorry).
Etisalat's Summer Slowdown seems to be with us once again. For the past week, possibly longer, their ADSL 'service' has been crawling along like a slow crawly thing. I've been scanning the papers for news of storms in the Indian Ocean causing not one, but two ships to sink and snap their subsea cables. To no avail.
Mind you, they probably wouldn't use that excuse again. No doubt their PR Officer/Tea Boy is scratching his head trying to come up with something more plausible - hence the delay in any kind of announcement / non-apology.
I know! 'It's the Atlanteans. Not dead, just resting. Recently awoken and roaming the sea-bed ripping up fibre-optic cables'.
Or: 'Underwater Tsunami Snaps Cables'. Or: 'Alien Spacecraft Crashes Into Indian Ocean: Cables Snapped'. Or: 'You Whingeing Expats Are All Going On Vacation: Why Should We Pay For Bandwidth That Won't Be Used?'
Hard on the heels of the launch of Etisalat's feeble Two Cabbage Leaves logo, I had occassion to visit their Jebel Ali shop. As the end of the month approached I thought I should give them a huge amount of money to pay for services rendered, 'cos, you know, they need it much more than I do, poor things. So I headed off to the nearest cash payment machine which quite happily accepted money for mobile and landline, but really was not interested in my broadband account. It refused to recognise the account number, even though it has done so in the past.
So I jump in the car and head off to the wilds of Jebel Ali. On entering the hallowed portals of Etisalat I was accosted by one of three young ladies in smart black uniforms.
Young lady: Hello Me: Grunt (thinking: get out of my way) Young lady: Are here to pay bills? Me: Grunt Young lady: Are you paying by cash or credit card? Me: Cash Young lady: Do you have more than five bills? Me: No (thinking: get the &%$^ out of my way) Young lady: Then you can use our shiny new Cash Payment Machine! Me: Can't Young lady: Sure you can, and look! There's no queue! Me: Doesn't work Young lady: Of course it does. It's very easy. I'll show you how to do it 'cos your obviously a bit thick Me: Please get out of my way
Head off to cash counter. Wait ten minutes. Pay money.
I'm sorry, but if you're trying to do customer service you should not block the way of people in a hurry and subject them to a five minute grilling. What a relief to hit the cash counters and find that nothing at all has changed: the indolent old staff still wearing their their own old clothes (competition idea: design a uniform for Etisalat staff, and no, dishdashas are not allowed), still grumpy and grunting, still think that customers are like criminals.
Compare and contrast: Etisalat's new way of describing themselves...
We enable people to reach each other, businesses to find new markets and everyone to fulfil their potential. Across the UAE, we provide telephone, TV and Internet services for everyone, and much more for businesses. We are increasingly present in international markets. Our customers enjoy the latest services and technologies, as well as a choice of great entertainment.
And the reality.
We're only a phone company and ISP, but we behave like a totalitarian dictator. We charge enormous fees for our services. We only give you half the Internet and criminalise access to the other half. We lie to you when things go wrong. We really do think you are stupid. We will never let you use VOIP until we can find a way to make you pay at least as much as you are paying now. So just give in and give us more money.
The BlackBerry has finally arrived in the Middle East. Research In Motion (RIM), the inventors of the BlackBerry (notwithstanding several patent infringement lawsuits) have teamed up with The Lovely Etisalat (TLE) to make it all happen.
BlackBerry service is initially being aimed at the corporate market, with prices to match. The handsets cost Dhs 2,500 - 3,000: fair enough, it is a SmartPhone. But there's a setup fee, a whopping Dhs 22,000! And then there's a monthly usage charge of Dhs 175 for 'always-on' UAE connection and Dhs 295 for international roaming. Oh, and don't forget additional charges for making phone calls.
Looks like TLE is making the most of its monopoly while it can, bless 'em.
I wasted a bit of time a few days ago doing an Etisalat survey. They are investigating the demand for faster broadband speeds - 4, 6 & 8 Megabippies are talked about. They ask how much I would be prepared to pay for this. Also what kind of 'gift' would I require as an incentive to upgrade - options range from a biro to a colour laser printer.
Ridiculous, and of course they don't give you any opportunity to vent your spleen about the existing shite service, whose speed never ever gets close to what it's supposed to be. Anyway, if they follow my suggestion, I'll soon be enjoying an 8 Megabippy connection for ten dirhams a month and driving around in a brand new Land Cruiser. I deserve it don't I (I've certainly nearly bloody paid for it over the last twelve years).
On a happier note, I was compelled to visit Etisalat yesterday because the barftuds had disconned my Interweb thingy. Amazingly, there was no queue! I pointed this out to the guy at the counter and he asked me if there'd been any big accidents on SZR that was stopping the punters from coming. I told him they'd all gone to du.
