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.
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.
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