deliver me from humidity

June is now in full swing. It's got to be the most disgusting weather on the planet. And, my air conditioning isn't working.

It's about 80 degrees in my room. All of the windows of the hotel are covered in fog because it's so hot outside. The place looks like a haunted house.

I woke up this morning around 630 and couldn't sleep because of the heat. I poked my head out into the corridor around 730 to get my newspaper. Dasan was standing outside my door. "I clean your room?" he asked hopefully. "Dude, I'm not going to the beach until 10," I responded. It's my first morning to relax in weeks. Dasan fiddled with his cart. I almost felt bad for not leaving.

He's recently presented me with a new card, almost twice the size of the one he initially gave me. I hope the new card is in response to all the letters I've written about what a good job he does. He turns the right side of my bed down. He always leaves me two chocolates instead of one. And he understands my organizational system and never rearranges any of my belongings into an unacceptable configuration.

At 10 am I head down to the beach, even though it's ridiculously hot and humid. Sitting in the shade, trying to read the newspaper, is almost unbearable. The paper melts into the sand like a piece of cheese. No breeze any more to stir the pages. The paper gets so soggy the pages stick together and the ink gets all over everything. I give up and throw it away. I pull out my ITIL books and start highlighting them so I can create a study document. My highlighter is liquefied and leaks all over everything.

I decide to go for a swim. Clumps of sand and salt float on top of the water like kitty litter. It's disgusting, like a huge ship carrying styrofoam has exploded off the beach. The water is around 95 degrees. Two lebanese girls get into a screaming match with a local. They say "Just because you're from here you think you have the right to talk to me?" He responds "Call the police, they will arrest you for being drunk" (the girls are standing in waist deep water with some kind of tropical drinks).

I check out my damsels. There are even more of them today. I see 7, including one big one I've never seen before. I also discover on the wall that separates my beach from the boat inlet, 2 crabs. They climb up the wall, and when the sun hits them they scurry back down the wall into the water.

I go back to the shade and try to read, but it's too hot. To put things in perspective, I've twice hiked across the grand canyon in 128 degree heat with my dad, carrying about 40 lbs of water. This is worse, and I'm doing nothing but sitting in the shade.

I go back to my room and find 3 filipino boys cleaning it. None are over 5'4" or 90 lbs. I slice up a pink lady and offer it to them, as well as some cold water from my refrigerator. My room feels hotter than 80 degrees even though that's what the thermostat says. Two of them sit on my bed and talk. It sounds like they are saying "la de la la la la, la LA LA de la la". I sit at my computer and try to work on my ITIL guide.

One kid gets about 5 towels and tries to bring them in my room. I'm like "Stop! I only need one towel!" He puts the towels on my bed, goes back to his cart, and bring two more in. Great. Eight towels. I could have a beach party.

Dasan shows up and yells at the guys sitting on my bed. I think. He says "la la LALALA de la la!" One leaves and the other gets the vacuum. He vacuums the inside of my closet, and then my running shoes. He vacuums so close to me (I'm sitting at my desk, working on my laptop) that I'm half tempted to pretend I'm being sucked into the vacuum. Dasan picks up my ITIL books I brought to the beach and holds them while the kid vacuums the sand off of them.

I finish my study guide and call my parents in the lobby, since my phone doesn't work well in my room. I go outside and immediately feel like someone has wrapped me in a wet towel and put me in the microwave. You can see when someone has been outside. They look like they've been through a rain storm because hair, clothes, and skin are all oozing and clammy, like we're all in some kind of horror movie in the first stages of fever that will eventually lead to us all becoming flesh eating zombies.

At 7 PM I go downstairs and attempt to walk to a sandwich shop. It's too hot. I feel like I'm going to pass out. So instead I order room service.

I like to make my tray into a small piece of artwork before I put it outside my door with a theme reflecting my feelings about the dinner I've just eaten. Tonight's theme was "your pita bread sucks". Usually, I like pita bread. But here, seriously, it tastes like pita bread that's been frozen in the refrigerator for 6 months and then reheated for too long in a microwave.

I hid everything except the bread basket in the bottom of the tray. Then I made some flower petals out of the pita bread, and put the packets of butter at the center. They really did look like flowers. Then I turned the bread basket upside down and used the little mustard and mayonnaise jars as eyes on top of the basket. I took a pepper strand left over from my salad and used that as a frowny mouth on the basket. I fashioned my napkin into an arrow of sorts, pointing at the pita flowers.

I don't know if they'll get it. They'll probably think I've lost my mind due to the heat and humidity.

They may be right.

wasta

Yesterday I didn't have ITIL training, but I had a project managers' meeting with my customer. The meeting consisted of sitting around the brau haus, a german restaurant in the Beach Rotana, and having a drink and getting to know the other PMs. My customer asked me to do the meeting because he's hoping other projects will start to follow the same plan and schedule I've set up for my project.

One thing people like to do here is show you how important they are. There's a term "wasta" (pronouced "wha-sta) that means you know someone so important you could run naked through the streets screaming and not get arrested. So, for example, I mentioned to a canadian that I had briefed the general he works for. The canadian immediately called the general up and had a weird conversation with him that involved a bunch of veiled references to them apparently getting up to no good a few weekends ago when their wives were both out of town. After the canadian called his general, all the other PMs had to call their generals. I just sat there smoking cigarettes because I hadn't even brought a phone.

Because he's very competitive, my customer not only called his general, but invited him for belly dancing. It turns out I've never met his general, but his general had heard about me from work I'd done out here previously. My heart sank when my customer told me that. I knew what was coming.

I was invited to the belly dancing dinner night. Ech. The last thing I want to do in my "free" time. On top of my regular job I'm writing a white paper, preparing a web cast, and alpha testing some software. I literally do not leave my computer except to go to the gym or to get food. My disinterest must have been very apparent, even though it was bad for me to not immediately agree to go since I had already told my customer I wouldn't drink a glass of cherry schnapps with him.

"But exciting things will happen at the dinner!" my customer says. Yeah, I bet, I was thinking to myself. Then he told me a story about how he had taken a bunch of VIPs out one night for belly dancing. They weren't drinking, but the sheesha was consumed with abandon. The belly dancers aren't exactly small people, but some of the VIPs were. One of the dancers got a little too close to the head VIP, who was apparently nodding off from too much sheesha. The dancer bumped him with her hip and knocked him clean out of his chair. The story recounted here is not that funny but was very funny when it was told last night.

Anyway, I'll see how shooting with the officers goes next week, and then decide if I even want to think about a belly dancing dinner. Tourists go so it's not like it's an abnormal thing to do.

I'd just rather stay home and do something else.

idle training

The reason I haven't written anything this week is I've been taking a 2 hour class every day after work. It's so I can get ITIL certified. The class costs about $1200 in the US, but my customer is letting me take it with them for free.

Well, you get what you pay for. Here's how the evening typically goes. The class is supposed to start at 5:15, meaning I should be in a taxi, on my way home, by 7:15.

But the conference room where the training is, which can barely fit all of us students, is never open at 5:15. So we wait. I normally put my laptop on the copier outside the conference room and try to weed through my emails. Even though I don't have internet connection at the training site I can at least get the mails ready to send when I get back to my hotel.

By 5:45 the room is usually free. Then hurdle #2. Out here time is more of a suggestion than a reality. Half the students still will not be there even though training is now starting 30 minutes later than planned. We wait another 15 minutes for them to show up.

By 6 the class starts. But then Ahmed, the tea boy, sometimes forgets to order our dinner. The class is stopped while he is tracked down and told to get us food. The students then protest they can't look at one more training slide until they are fed.

By 7:30 I've already completed my exam. I've started passing the answers sneakily around the class to speed up the exam review. One student in particular will take 5 minutes to guess the answer to his question. He always seems to pick the wrong answer, and there are 5 choices, so we have to sit through him selecting 4 wrong answers before selecting the right one. On Wednesday I suggested to him that he pick what he thinks is the wrong answer and maybe he'll get a test question right. He smiled, but I wasn't joking.

By 8:00, if I'm lucky, class breaks up. Then I stand outside on Khalige Al Arabi street and hope an empty taxi comes by. I normally wait about 15 minutes, sometimes more. I let a student give me a ride back to my hotel the first night of class, but he ended up purposely driving the long way so we could "chat". I was stressing out because I had a conference call and now have decided that rides from students take longer than waiting for a taxi.

Every night this week I had a conference call. Around 9:15 or 10, depending on how long my call goes, I start to think about dinner, decide I'm too tired, and then I go to bed. I haven't even had a chance to work out a single night this week.

Training ends next Wednesday and I take my exam. After all of this, I better get that stupid certification.