DISCLAIMER
People often ask me what it's like being an expat in Dubai. Actually they don't but like the rest of this blog, let's just blindly assume people care what I think and go on from there. Dubai is beautiful, it's a sun-drenched tax-free paradise, with a wise and benevolent ruler. There is no real winter to speak of and the roads are beset with outrageous supercars. If your eyes ever tire of street level gawking, there are thousands of kilometres of sky scrapers to develop neck trauma to. Yes, in many ways it is paradise, but what is paradise without a little trouble? In the Wachowski (formerly) brothers movie trilogy: The Matrix, a sentient program called 'Agent Smith' describes the failure of our robot overlords to captivate and pacify human minds in a sensory-fed utopia: "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your "perfect world". But I believe that, as a species human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. So the perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from". And that's where we are with this blog: a long whimsical stare in to the bathroom mirror wondering what would have happened if you took the blue pill, intended as nothing more than a (sincerely respectful) bit of probing in to the more bizarre side of living in the UAE.
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".
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