TYPE-2 CLEOPATRA SYNDROME

Since moving to Dubai I’ve observed a curious phenomenon within the (admittedly middle class) expatriate community I have become a part of. In the process of coming up with a name for it, I was railroaded in to calling it Type-2 Cleopatra Syndrome because a quick google search revealed that some tweed-bearded psych grad had already nabbed ‘Cleopatra Syndrome’ for something completely different. I didn’t spend the extra 5 minutes it would have taken to find out what the symptoms involve because unless it was about having a fringe and doing the flat palmed ‘walk like an Egyptian’ dance, I would have been devastated. Cleopatra’s claim to fame in the pop psyche is as the lady who bathed in asses milk. Why would anybody want to do that? A couple of reasons; maybe she thought it would provide any number of the miraculous benefits modern cosmetic companies say are unleashed by their own new formulas derived from the humble cumquat or maybe because, like damn it, I can afford it and I’m the freaking queen.

The syndrome manifests in divacine tendencies: a narrowing of the awareness of others, profound sense of self-importance or marching down the street wearing nothing but stilettos and proclaiming to all within earshot that you are wearing the finest silk robes the world has ever seen. But what is it in this new society that creates these Cleopatra like tendencies?

Service providers, through the huge pool of cheap labour, have created an economy that prioritises convenience for the sizeable middle class. Restaurants will deliver to your door, they will even deliver through your door if you can’t be bothered to get up and you’ve left it open, if you give the delivery driver a tip I’m sure they would even lovingly spoon each mouthful of food in to your mouth and wipe your chin after you’re done. Nannies, drivers, maids, dog walkers, chefs – home help is in abundant supply in Dubai, there’s a couple of niches left to occupy but as soon as the first Candy Crush level beater butler turns up with a chauffeur companion that will flip off drivers that cut you up on the Sheikh Syed Road and listen attentively to the stories about your other half’s day at work, that’s it, all non-employment tasks of the daily routine covered by outsourced personnel. You can’t even pack your own groceries in a super market, even if you want to, try wrestling a sheet of plastic out of the hands of a till clerk in a convenience store – it’s impossible, it’s like trying to take a Jack Russell out of the mouth of another Jack Russell.

If you tell somebody enough times that they don’t have to do a particular task, because it is in some way below them – they will start to believe it. And it is scientific fact, that that will make them a douchebag.

Look it’s absolutely human nature to want a better standard of living. It’s an evolutionary imperative, a fundamental driver of human behavior, perhaps the strongest one after the need to pop out mini-we. Altruism is actually an aberrant behavior if you think about it – poor Dave over there looks hungry, I have some beans, but I quite like the taste of beans and I’m also quite hungry. For me to walk over and give at least some of my beans to Dave is in a nutritional sense, and for the furtherment of me and my clan, absolutely the wrong thing to do. So I stay seated eat my beans all the while telling myself that Dave doesn’t look much like a bean eater anyway. What lifts us out of this mentality, is compassion,  it’s putting yourself in Dave’s shoes and thinking about duties, about the ‘oughts’ of a community; what is fair: whether this is an innately human quality or prerequisite for the contract of society is not for me to decide. Or you, so stop it. Stop deciding.

What dulls these humanising inclinations is not detachment from society, but rather an insidious yet attractive regression to a primal state, a state where a false perception of self-entitlement prevails – made possible by people doing stuff for you, that you previously had to do yourself. In more plain terms – you start off by thinking “that Kanye West is a real piece of work, walking around getting his entourage of fluffers to pick the pulp out of his juice” and then after a period of months and years you end up agreeing with him on almost every single point of his manifesto of all consuming ego.

The reason that I’m sharing this is not to provide a wholesale condemnation of my fellow expatriates, it’s so that we can recognise the warning signs in ourselves and each other and therefore help steer our ship of conscientious objectors to less rancorous waters. To aid our awareness, I have compiled a quick reference guide of some of the possible early onset flags:

1. Looking at your steam iron and contemplating putting mineral water in it.

2. Deliberating about whether it’s proper that a maid might dress you.

3. Expecting people in the service industry to turn their back on thousands of years of capitalist economics and give you something just “because you want it”.

4. Having Victorian era job titles in your employ (please see: scullery maid, chimney sweep, powder monkey).

5. Expecting people in the service industry to hand over their private mobile numbers, so that you can contact them at 04:00 in the morning and assuming they will gleefully answer and sort out your problem using the special abilities of remote server mind control that only people on modest salaries have.

6. Ordering single items from mini-marts based in your apartment building. When you’re not hungover. More than twice. In an hour.

7. Owning ‘house shoes’.

8. If your Chihuahua went to finishing school, has done a Thai cookery course, has a ballet teacher, Latin tutor or term report card.

9. You stubbornly refuse to recycle because the recycling bins are all the way down, RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE RECEPTION AREA OF YOUR APARTMENT BUILDING.

10. Collecting stories of any of the points above.

We can overcome. We can turn the tide. We can become the model citizens this country deserves us to be. But we have to actively try to be less Veruca Salt and little bit more like a guilty feeling Peppa Pig.  

Is that A Mexican Wrap In Your Pocket Or Do You Have Dysentery ?

One of the most satisfying complaint letters I've ever written, it was to a restaurant specialisng in chicken, that to avoid a lawsuit and deportation, will remain nameless. Menu items have also had their names changed to prevent identification.

Dear Sirs

I am writing this correspondence partly as a letter of complaint but also as public record of my last will and testament. I made an order from your restaurant through the popular takeaway comparison site (namewitheld.com) - seduced by the user reviews which bolstered your claim to be "xxxxxxx" (name witheld). The delivery was timely and the gentleman transporting the goods was an excellent ambassador for your company. He politely completed the transaction as we went through the ritualistic dance of swapping money for merchandise. A transaction that I now regret with the same fervor as somebody that selects shaving equipment based on the relative degree of rustiness on the blunt jagged edges.

I opened the bag that he delivered and stared down at the food - 1 portion of chips, 1 can of fizzy drink, 1 box of spicy chick cack (edit) and a Mexican wrap. 

To be absolutely fair - the can of coke was OK, it met my expectations head on with a firm handshake and a familiar nod. 

The chips however were cold, damp and hewn from the same material as Hugh Grant's hair. If they were a top trump card, their Taste Factor would be 17 - meaning they would lose in a head to head with grouting putty (which incidentally has a taste factor of 19 (in case you were wondering)). But that being said - the chips were by far and away the highlight of the food offerings. 

Let me get on to the The Mexican Wrap, before the stomach cramps, diarrhea and the tunnel of light take away my ability to moan. Mexico, ahhh Mexico - spiritual home of the half-arsed job and the burrito - I can perfectly understand why you decided to call the wrap that - some may say that it's misleading, that calling a food item Mexican - means that you should probably make some effort to simulate the taste inspired by that area. You know what I say to those people - those dream tramplers? Well by and large I agree with them, but I'd stick up for you in as much as the taste of the wrap did effectively encapsulate certain parts of Mexico - very specifically: anywhere you might find the slowly decaying carcass of a stray dog on a heavily polluted river estuary. 

The sauce: I imagine that at some point in your efforts to synthesize your own version of the Colonel's 11 secret herbs and spices - you gave up, and focused your time and attention on a much more fruitful activity like bending space time or harvesting cosmic rays as a cheap and limitless solution to the world's energy crisis. I assume that during these great works you happened upon a way to titrate dark matter and were pleasantly surprised that when added to a squeeze of lime juice and a foaming broth of poultry offal - gave the Mexican wrap just the right level of gut wrenching billious humor the haggered pension-aged chicken it's paired with deserved. 

Spicy Chick cack (edit). My own fault really - I've always been a sucker for creative marketing. Chick cack (edit) is I presume the latin name for the species used as the meat for the dish - is it a predecessor of the chicken or the next evolutionary leap? It's funny because - people often say when introduced to a new meat - that it tastes like chicken, ironically - your chicken doesn't actually taste like chicken. It tastes like the colour brown. An achievement that shouldn't go unrewarded by the Nobel committee. 

I calculate - based on the reproductive cycles of amoebic dysentery and aggressive crypto-bacteria - I have only a few hours left before the coma kicks in and I complete the rest of my life's dining through a tube. In that time I would be much obliged if you could confirm to me that you don't provide any of the catering to the intensive care wards of hospitals local to this area. My next of kin however would happily accept any money off vouchers you may deem fit to offer for cans of coke.

Many Thanks

The Fear Of Change

When I first got to Dubai, I heard a story about a man that walked in to Zoom store and paid for a packet of cigarettes with a 500 AED note, and was neither asked if he had 'anything smaller sir?' Or 'do you have 1 Dihrum change sir?'. Of course we can conclude this is pure fantasy, an urban legend that stemmed from a desperate need to believe that somewhere - there is a cash business that is stocked with an appropriate supply of change for a days trading. 

How often have you given a taxi driver a 100 AED note for a fare of less than 30 dihrums and not received a look which should be more accurately paired with handing over a 12 sided Rubick's cube and a blindfold? Only for him to grudgingly whip out a wad of notes that would feed all the slot machines in Las Vegas for a calendar month.

I simply cannot fathom why businesses - whose sole method of transaction is cash - can regard you with contempt for wanting to pay with the smallest denomination of note the cash machine plugged into the front of their shop will give you. £20 ? £20 ? Who are you, the sultan of Microsoft? I can't possibly change that, why don't you pop over the road to the Ferrari garage and see if you can change it up in to some gold billion.

Either someone needs to change the lowest note value in the cash machines, get all retailers (and taxis) into the 21st Eftpos century, use common sense to make sure your cash float is ample for a days trading (most places have been open for more than one day so using yesterday's accounting should provide a reasonable template), or we just do away with the system of financial exchange altogether and buy peanuts with whimsical tales of our homeland, and soft drinks with interpretive dance. Let Buzzfeed decide.

The Wheel Of Disproportionate Hangovers

I'm a strict atheist, and as such never drink. But when I do drink, which is all the time, I'm drunk now in fact, I get drunk on good old booze, moonshine, grandpa's old whooping cough syrup, not on life. What do people think they are saying by being ''drunk on life''? That they're giddy with delirium from the same continuum that they've been part of since birth. No, what they're saying is - 'void my driving license immediately, it would be irresponsible to leave children in my care, have you seen my other shoe? Whose shoe is this? fetch me a kebab'. It's largely irrelevant because life is condition of existence and not a hopsy beverage - which means these people are either lying, or suffering from a mental illness where they dissociate and absentmindedly sniff marker pens every 5 minutes.

Anyway, I digress, as usual. So, after a drinking session - we're left in varying degrees of fragility which should be relative to the quantity, type and mixing (enhanced or mitigated by other negligible contributory factors) of alcohol drunk. In Dubai however, it doesn't seem to follow any such observable pattern. Sometimes I have literally a few small glasses of wine and wake up with a hangover worthy of 4th movie in the film franchise of the same name - where a band of irresponsible man-children act out deeply suppressed sociopathic tendencies in either Bangkok or Vegas. 

Other times, I drink several people's skin's full - the type of drunk where you walk in gait born of a hybrid between Fagin and Captain Jack Sparrow, and wake up either still pleasantly drunk or lacking the expected all-engulfing black hole of hang. The variable that seems to have the most influence is how much you have planned for the next day, which is then amplified by physically saying out loud that you can only have a couple - because of the amount of things you have planned for the next day. 

Maybe it's the heat, maybe it's indiscriminate roofie fairies, maybe it''s solar flares or refracted sunlight through swamp gas or the illuminati, whatever the cause - it can be neatly analogised by spinning the big wheel of disproportionate hangovers.

Queue: The Abuse

Did you know if you took all the blood vessels out of the human body and stretched them end to end, you've probably just tried to walk out of a lift in Dubai, only for 17 people to push past you on the way in to the lift because, (presumably and this is the only reason I can come up with for the level of etiquette malfunction) they've misinterpreted the ping of the elevator's arrival with a klaxon signalling the start of the hunger games.

It's still the only part of the world that I've seen placement mats on the floor of metro station platforms showing, with childlike simplicity,  where to stand so as to not be a space hoovering self entitled monster of a bellend. But you may as well write the text in Aramaic and instead of using conventional lines and arrows, use a series of crying laughter face emojis, for all the efficacy of it.

The train for Jebel Ali will be arriving at the Jebel Ali platform - all 5 of our senses can detect this, and in any case if it was arriving on the other platform - the resultant fireball from the head-on collision would be tiding enough. It's an entirely superfluous announcement, how about instead: announcing that the trap door located beneath the 'stand here to allow passengers to disembark' sign has been primed and the camel spiders below have been starved of human flesh for just long enough for them to give up halfway through the job.

Or - you know how you get flash dance mobs, how about flash sniper victim mobs, just people disobeying sign rhetoric feigning a shot to the temple every now and again as a macabre but enthusiastic reminder that chivalry, although dead, is not as dead as the person flouting it.

With the exception of Argos and deli counters in supermarkets pre-1990 - the 'take a ticket and wait for your number to be called' method for human accounting has been largely replaced by standing in queues. It's renaissance in Dubai can only be explained by the fact that the concept of queuing is just too much for some people in the UAE. I applaud the sentiment, but it's not foolproof: you still get the occasional hardline nonconformist who will walk up to a counter and get turned away for either brandishing a completely incorrect number or having their elaborate forgery uncovered on the basis that "our tickets don't have numbers written in crayon sir".

Steak Guilt

Steak guilt. Like catholic guilt, but best served with sacrament on the side.

I'm a grown adult human man - but am completely incapable of walking in to a restaurant and ordering something that isn't than steak. It's not that I don't like other things, I love other food things - but when I'm reading other food things on a menu - "strewn on a bed of this" "delicately layered with that" - what I'm actually seeing is "steaky steaky steak steak, where is the f**king waiter and why is he not bringing me my f**king steak".

I quite often externally toy with idea of ordering something else, "hmmm the duck sounds nice", "I haven't had fish in a while" - my wife rolls her eyes in a perfect non verbal communication of: "this again, must we endure another cabaret of bulls**t, before you decide on the steak as if born of some moment of inspired craving". The waiter comes over and explains the specials - I might be saying "oh hand selected, really?" But he can read the look in my eyes, he's seen it a million times before. It's a scientific fact that corneas can't dribble, but you know what science? You patrol around a fancy steak board, dress it up with slutty veins of fat and talk dirty with words like 'marbling' and 'rump'... just watch my peepers drip.

I eat so much steak, I'm sure I've started hearing Hindus audibly hiss at me when I walk by. There is no internationally approved hand gesture for "I'm sorry for being a human conveyor belt of oblivion to your holy animal". I know it's not healthy, I know that variety is the spice of life, but I can't help it - and with the frequency of visits to restaurants that seems to be inexplicably mandatory in Dubai, I'm racking up the score count on the worlds least vegan friendly live action videogame.

I'd like to write an open letter to the vegetarians and apologise for my conduct during meal times, but I can't because I'm not sorry - it would be as hollow and transparent as your presumably osteodeficient bones. Cows evolved to be tasty and delicious - a brave but ultimately perilous niche to occupy in a world based on consumption. It's dog eat dog, I'm just not that comfortable eating dog.

I'm not saying I don't feel bad that something has to die so I can eat something tasty - it's just that I don't feel bad enough to not eat it. Besides, If we get too tangled up in the metaphysics of food, I'm sure there's a convincing case to be made on the ethical treatment of Haribo. So I'm left in a limbo of irresolvable insoluble guilt.

If the, by now enraged, eyeball popping, mouth foaming, though almost certainly lethargic, vegetarians want some crumb of karmic justice: I'm the only person that I know of to have suffered gout at the age of 25. So yay cows, boo me. Gout really really hurts.

All I Need Is Your Bank Account Number, Sort Code, First Ever Phone Number, Cat's Mother's Maiden Name And How Many Fingers I'm Holding Up

On average I have to psyche myself up for 30 minutes in a dark room and listen to classical music whilst tracing zen lines in a sand pit before I call the bank in Dubai. This is a minimum requirement as set out by the universal law governing spontaneous human combustion.

I love marketing slogans for banks. They're always so gloriously pompous: "there for you" or "the things we do for dreams" for a full list, have a scan through this ( http://thefinancialbrand.com/1779/financial-slogans/ ). Millions, perhaps billions of dollars hurled at marketing companies to make the purpose of holding on to your money and charging you extortionate rates for doing anything with it - seem like a noble enterprise. If I was king all banks would have to advertise under the same tag line:  "Frivolously squandering your children's future".

I only really have experience of dealing with one bank in Dubai, so I'm not sure if it's the same for all of them - but from conversations with people on the topic - I think there are threads of commonality across the sector. In which case it's not fair to name the bank, so let's call them "eclipse" - which makes them sound like the shadowy cabal of Bond Villains I think they probably are.

So when I first opened my account with Eclipse, I received my debit card with instructions to call them and set up my PIN. Hmmm, unconventional - but we're in Dubai, a place that is no stranger to innovation. So using the Nokia starter kit phone that is a right of passage when you first arrive in Dubai, and forever will be twixt with your bank account - come rain or apocalypse whichever happens first - I called them up.

Conversation starts well; I explain my requirements, chap on the other end understands and goes over the steps. In a moment I will be passed through to an automated service that will enable me to select my PIN - after completion, I will be passed back to an operator who will make the final adjustments in the system and voila. A stress free, better than receiving a PIN in the non existent postal service, customer experience.

So after speaking with eclipse employee A, I'm transferred to... A noise that sounds suspiciously like a dial tone. I seem to have been inadvertently cut off. No huge drama, I'll just call back up. Hey, it's employee A again "listen mate, I think when you were trying to put me through to the automated service before, you accidentally... What automated service? The one for PIN activation.. But it was definitely you, same voice, same name.. Same wilful disregard for an easy life".

5 minutes later a fragile mutual entente is reached. I will once again be transferred to the automated PIN activation line and from there back to the consultant etc etc etc. *insert dial tone noise*.

You have to be joking, twice in a row? 3rd call takes place in a slightly less patient tone. "Listen buddy - I've been having a nightmare trying to set my PIN up" "oh you need the automated service, give me one moment, I'll put you through" "NOOOOOO".
*insert dial tone noise*.

Call number 4, the simmering rage faintly audible in my voice. Quick explanation about putting me through to the automated line and being cut of. The employee tells me "of course, the automated service is out of order at the moment sir"
"is it now? Well that explains a lot. How do we proceed in this case?"
"Let me just put you through to the automated service"
"DONT YOU F*CKING DA..."
*insert dial tone noise"

The shattered pieces of my patience assemble into just enough of a workable constitution to allow me to make the call again without hurling the phone in to orbit like superman dealing with his porn stash as the mother in law makes an unexpected visit. I'll skip the next 1 hour 20 minutes because this is already dragging on a bit. But eventually - in a process that's more error than trial, that could be expedited by replacing all the call centre agents with monkeys trying to rewrite Shakespeare's complete works on typewriter: we get there.

A rogue event perhaps? Unlucky? Bad day to choose a PIN? Apparently not - every single person I have spoken to that banks with eclipse went through the same thing.  I know what you're thinking.. If you don't like it - leave. I'll tell you what - if everybody left that didn't like one particular thing about somewhere - the f*cking world would be empty, we'd all be flakey negligent fickle quitters aboard a starship moaning about either the lack or presence of mushrooms in the mushroom pot noodles and in search of an impossible dream. I love this country. I do not love eclipse.

Just How Needful Is It?

Kindly do the needful. Is needful a word? Isn't it spelt 'necessary' and pronounced 'necessary' - do we really need 'mindful's' bastard younger brother turning up as a hungry understudy to an already well established perfectly adequate lead?

The thing that infuriates me most about it, isn't that it's use replaces another more appropriate word, it's that 'kindly do the needful' is entirely superfluous if it's left on it's own at the end of an email. Because presumably - you've already asked someone to do the necessary in one of the preceding sentences or your correspondent will have literally no idea what the needful is. So you're simply repeating a command that you've already given. What you're suggesting is that the recipient might have such a basic intellect that your original request of "please ensure that the main brace is spliced, and the rigging is taut" (yes today's rant is pirate themed) has been misconstrued as nonspecific theoretical musing, intended for nothing more than igniting inspiration. But it's ok though because you followed it up with "please do the needful". Disaster averted. Pirate ship saved. Congratulations.

Actually it's not even that. That's the way language is going these days. We're still in a global recession and we have to keep these otherwise redundant letters in a job, else they'll start hanging round on street corners and start forming text speak or abbreviations of television shows, because as we all know there simply isn't time to say all the practically innumerable syllables in 'Game of Thrones'. No - it's not the eyeball-rolling farcical pointlessness of it that truly shivers me timbers (see, continuity, even if it's been transparently crowbarred in), it's that at the end of a particularly mundane email, if I'm not in full control of my faculties, I find myself motioning to type it. Then follows hours of soul searching and self loathing, doing the needful examination of the self, resolving that if you can't beat them: start making up your own entirely convoluted nonsensical throw-away buzz phrases. Sometimes I like to try and fill a whole email with them if I really fancy a challenge:

Dear Sir / Madam / otherness

I recommend although cannot insist that you be receptive to the following coordination.

Following the happenstances of whence, further investigation had been deemed as potentially both viable and beneficial.

I trust that you will ensure that all appropriate measures will be considered and discussed amongst you, yourself and thy. And that these measures are In fact measures and not rude limericks written in really small writing on grains of rice.

Yours evidently

The ministry of ministrations

Toilet attendant to customer ratios in malls.

On average, certainly in the male "rest (another rant for another day)"rooms, 2:1 in favour of the people earning a (legitimate) wage from being there.

Now first of all, I'm making a solemn and sincere declaration: I could not do their job, so they are better than me in some, if not all, ways. Disclaimer out of the way: I have never seen a more vivid image of melancholy than the one that hangs in the eyes of those poor cleaners as they're gently massaging the basins of the sink - pupils fixed on their opposing self in the mirror. You want to know about the fragile nature of the identity of self - those are the guys to ask. I bet their poetry is magical.

The problem with life as an existential philosopher - as almost all student accommodation will validate - is that cleanliness is oft neglected in favour of musing. Despite the omnipresence of personnel, I'm yet to walk into a cubicle and not wince at the pooled liquid on the seat, engage the "I'm sure it's probably just water from the handheld rectal massage / bidet device" part of my consciousness and wipe it off with an environmentally devastating amount of paper.

The ruddy bizarre thing is that, Every other thing is typically sparkling - especially the high def soul X-Ray mirrors, which makes me think - are they leaving that liquid on the toilet seat on purpose to elicit some sort of deep soul searching thought experiment? Or maybe, I'm thinking about it too much. Or maybe that's what they want me to think. Curse you toilet philosphers, I've come I here for a poo not a migraine.