13. A Pyrrhic victory

It is our second Christmas and we have been here sixteen months. By now I have managed to build a fiercely loyal team, not easy given the difficulties with recruitment.

Joramae is a gem. She is remarkably adept linguistically, having been born in the Philippines and brought up in Saudi Arabia. Hence she is bilingual in Arabic and English and speaks three Philippino dialects. She also has a pharmacy degree, remarkable emotional intelligence and knows everyone. She would be perfect as my assistant executive director but, because of the perverse labour laws, she cannot be promoted - so I am trawling the ex-pat head-hunters to find someone suitable.

Andrea fits the bill perfectly. She arrives and in a no-nonsense way gets to work with the Arabs in outlying hospitals. She builds up a good relationship with the plastic surgery team who then give her tips on how they might improve various bits of her anatomy. She is a good-looking woman who has no need of such work. The surgeons merely laugh and say, “Well if you change your mind, Miss Andrea, you know where we are.” It is fascinating that they feel comfortable with making such personal observations. I seem to have escaped, but maybe they think I am beyond improvement.

Things are getting better. I am building up my team. Honeylet’s replacement was poached by an unscrupulous colleague so for a while, I had no secretarial support. Joramae came to the rescue. She found a Filipino schoolteacher who had fallen out with his Qatari employers for unfathomable reasons. Nevertheless he was keen to stay in the Gulf and to bring his family over to live with him. His clammy handshake and tense expression revealed his nervousness when I interviewed him. He had no direct secretarial experience but was well educated and keen to learn so I took a risk. It paid off and he has proved a loyal and companionable worker.

Achieving even the smallest or most trivial thing here can take an amazing amount of time, effort and wheeling-and-dealing

There are masses of new hospital buildings under construction but somehow they never get finished. Meanwhile we are appointing new staff in droves and there is nowhere for them to work. The solution is obvious: send staff working in an adjacent building into a new block off-site, then move our admin staff into the vacated space.

Unsurprisingly no one wants to go. Possibly if plush new offices were on offer it would be different but sadly the reality is that this is a communal open-plan space off-site.

I have not been involved in the planning and anyway it isn’t really my responsibility, but with the boss away and the incumbent statisticians deciding on a sit-in, I am called in to sort out the mess. Their diminutive professor is angry: diplomacy and tact seem the only solution. Keep him talking. He is originally from Turkey and as I extol the virtues of the Aegean coast, he starts to calm down. Eventually he agrees to move half his team.

It’s a Pyrrhic victory since that still doesn’t leave enough space for the incomers, our admin staff. This move is like a line of dominoes except they are falling haphazardly and there is no contingency plan. Actually it becomes increasingly apparent that there is no plan at all. From memory of the new offices, I sketch a floor plan on my flipchart and allocate a few desks and suddenly people are crowding into my office (luckily I am staying put) to see The Plan.

Not that they take any notice. It is first come, first served and still the statisticians are reluctant to leave and make way.

Meanwhile someone complains about the smelly carpets and then termites are discovered, so an army of painters, pest destroyers and cleaners appear among the complaining exiting statisticians and the newcomers bagging all the best desks. Anarchy doesn’t even begin to describe the chaos.

I retreat to my own territory where Aliya is in melt-down. She isn’t moving over there. The large, heavily made-up eyes are flashing above her niqab as she tries to explain that as an Arabic speaker she needs to be near me in order to converse with people in Arabic, thus helping my communication. This is a fair point except that she doesn’t speak English, so her skills as an interpreter are somewhat limited.

However, my advice is always to choose your battles and I am unlikely to win this one so I capitulate but explain that she has to move desks. “No problem”, is the reply and this time the eyes are smiling. She settles in next to my male secretary, bringing her assortment of trinkets, dates, boxes of Arabic sweets and other such useful paraphernalia on her desk.

By now things have calmed down over the road. The professor has gone on leave back to Istanbul and his staff have moved into their off-site offices, grumbling about the lack of parking. There’s actually plenty of parking: they simply mean there are no named spaces and the new car park is built on European lines, which means that it is necessary to manoeuvre the car into a space rather than sweeping into the slot in one easy motion. Meanwhile the walls of the newly emptied space have been freshly painted ... although there is now a hole on one wall where the termites were happily munching until the exterminators arrived.

Back in my corridor, I am surveying the scene when Aliya of the niqab comes in and tells me, with a combination of halting English and body language, that a senior Arab has passed by and is appalled that she, a local woman, is being made to sit opposite the gents’ lavatory. This is an exaggeration since the gents is in fact across the corridor, down another and around a corner, but again, deciding that this is another battle to dodge, I arrange for her to go somewhere else, after much cajoling of other staff. Peace at last, except that she doesn’t want to go there, but wishes to stay in the room with my secretary. Her solution is simple: she will nick someone else’s desk, then they can face the lavatory. The unfortunate, putative lavatory gazer spends most of her time elsewhere (in a place where space is at a premium, one might ask why she is allowed the luxury of two desks, but the answers would be unbelievably opaque) so I agree to the niqab-wearer’s desk nicking plan.

Five minutes later my secretary sidles into my office and explains that he feels very uncomfortable sharing an office with a veiled Qatari lady.

“Don’t worry,” I assure him. “She might wear it but she isn’t religious and she couldn’t care less.”

“But I am religious,” he explains, “and it makes me uncomfortable. In fact I can’t work there.”

So now we have grumbling statisticians in their off-site open-plan office, but their professor has somehow kept a personal office on-site. Some of our staff have moved into the vacated offices but have used three of the spaces for large, unwieldy and unnecessary filing cabinets, so we still have too few desks and my male Muslim Filipino secretary is floating around trying to dodge the flirtatious niqab-wearer. The boss is back next week! Good to know that we start the New Year in good shape.

Lionel points out that the pinnacle of my career has turned into becoming an ex-pat overseer of multi-cultural office allocation, not unlike a medieval bazaar - as ever, back in the Middle Ages.

The addendum to this story is that the blustering fussy professor is subsequently accused of cooking the books. He is said to be creaming off research grants for his own personal use. Whether this is true or not, now one knows but he goes in a hurry. I last see him clearing out his office.

“I’ve resigned,” he beams. “I’m on the plane back to Istanbul tomorrow.”

Presumably he thinks it best not to argue his case.