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.

Tuesday, 14 July 2015

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.
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