I won't say I'm getting desperate...

...





...but some days a fella will kiss anything.

Saudi Arabia bans "chirpers"

VOA NEWSWIRE - Riyadh, April 1, 2011 -- As part of his program to move forward with progressive reforms in the kingdom, and some pundits say, consolidate his base of support, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah today announced that all car alarm “chirpers”—the high-pitched screeching devices that sound off whenever a vehicle is jostled or a heavy truck rumbles by—are hereby outlawed.

Click here to listen to a typical chirper.

The new law goes into effect immediately though enforcement will not begin for another two weeks to give owners time to disable the devices.

A 150 SAR fine will be levied for every violation and offenders will receive notification at their next ATM transaction, just like any traffic fine.

“These things are un-Islamic, useless and just plain annoying, annoying jedn,” (very annoying) a spokesman for the King said. We’re pretty sure no one in the 7th century had one for his camels and we certainly don’t need them now.”

Imams throughout the kingdom applauded the ruling.

“People don’t mind getting up for the dawn Fajr prayer, but they don’t need the annoyance of these devices going off at all hours, disturbing their sleep and disrupting domestic tranquility just because car washers are trying to make a few riyals at 5am,” said Al Rajhi Mosque imam Abdullah Abdulrahman ibn Abdulmajid ibn Abdulkareem. “The harsh chirping or squeaking noises can be heard for blocks away and the resulting lack of sleep causes the faithful to lose concentration during prayers.”

It is expected that chirping remote keyless entry devices will be added to the ban shortly.

“What? They’re not content to just have flashing lights! They have to hear where their SUV is too?” added a highly placed interior ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"It's really a quality of life issue" said a leading political observer in Riyadh who spoke on condition of anonymity. "The 135 SR billion ($36 billion US) in social benefits just announced were a bit abstract for the average Saudi to fully get on board with. This new law hits home where it counts...in the bedroom."

According to the New York City Police Department, car alarms are actually making the crime problem worse because false alarms are so common that people simply ignore them. And the director of the criminology center at the University of Pennsylvania, Lawrence Sherman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, "No study has demonstrated that they reduce auto theft."

"Get your chirping out of your system now," warned an unidentified highly placed official in the Ministry of SUVs, "because it'll be kalaboush for offenders by the next new moon."

Rooftop shenanigans

Boys will be boys.

And what 9-year-old boys like to do when their parents aren't watching is climb up somewhere high and sneak a smoke.

Of course I'm just guessing about them being 9. It's a pretty good bet. Probably how old I was when I was doing the same thing.

Except I didn't have a nice, secure rooftop completely out of view of anyone (except an unseen 6th-floor neighbor) to play on.

So I'm just amusing myself on a lazy Riyadh Friday afternoon, avoiding work and admiring the view when I see the two youngsters perched on the roof of the small utility building which is situated in the middle of a rooftop filled with satellite dishes and laundry lines.

I can see the two lads lighting up, without a care I imagine, unaware of the political turmoil around the Gulf on this so-called Day of Rage.

What they don't see is a lady and (one presumes) daughter coming out to hang laundry below.


One of the boys must have heard something because he strolls over to the edge, looks down and jumps back, scurrying to tell his friend. Like a scene out of Rear Window, I realize I have a perfect view of an unfolding drama, an unseen seer. The mother and daughter have no idea the boys are up on the utility roof. They also don't know that I can see them doing their laundry...which would normally be of no interest, except I'm wondering how the boys are going to get down. For their part, the boys don't know that I can see them and that I can also see their mother and the daughter.

One of the boys creeps over to the edge a few times to check the ladies' progress, but hanging out the laundry seems to be a timeless operation this Friday afternoon. The boys settle down for another smoke.

I was tempted to call out or whistle to them, to let them know that I could tell them when the coast would be clear. I figured that would just freak them out, not to mention it could alert the mother.

I watch as the boys determine the women have left the scene and decide it's time to hightail it out of Dodge. But the ladder is very tall and the boys are very short. Plus, they don't know if the ladies are coming back. Something tells me the boys are not supposed to be up there, much less smoking. A few tentative tries on the ladder sees the first one down. The second guy follows.

Mission accomplished. My work is done.

1234

A perfect waste of time and dirt

Admittedly, picking up and counting every pre-paid phone card on a 1-km walk to work could be considered a complete waste of time by many folks. I prefer to call it an exercise in anthropological observation.

Either way, I have found something that even my dear mother would consider a monumentally pointless activity. (And she is someone who patiently watched me engaging in numerous monumentally pointless and dangerous activities as a child.)

What I'm doing is moving red dirt from a next-door construction site to a series of small but useless "planters" in front of my own apartment building.

Here's what one of the planters looks like in its current state:

(I call this a "planter" because at one time the building owners constructed about 20 of these square concrete structures and planted mini-palm trees. Naturally they didn't consider how the plants would be watered so all but 3 or 4 of them have died.)

There are three pretty good reasons my enterprise is pointless:

1) Saudi Arabia is vast, inherently dusty, sandy and windblown desert environment...and that's just the cities! (insert comedic rim shot) And there's 2.3 million sq. kilometers of sand and ground up rock on the Arabian peninsula trying to get in.

2) There appears to be very little if any regulation for construction sites so that it's common to see large piles of uncovered dirt, rubble, worker refuse and construction materials that blow up and down the street.

3) Pedestrians in this multi-ethnic neighborhood regard the street and sidewalk simply as places to deposit whatever cigarette butts, tissues, glass bottles, juice boxes, gum wrappers--and phone cards of course--that they happen to find in their hand at the moment and have no more use for.

So this Thursday morning while I was doing my laundry, which is just a few steps from the streetfront, I got the idea to go outside and fool around with the planters for a half hour with pretty red dirt from the construction site next door.

All three planters now have about 2 inches of red dirt and whatever objets d'art I could find lying around as a centerpiece. Thus we have a nice flat rock, a cylindrical block of something or other that reminded me of a ka'ba sticking out of the dirt, and a 6-inch piece of plastic tubing (pic #3) embedded in the dirt with rocks and a stick.

How long will these three planters remain butt- and soda-can free?

I'm guessing a day or two.

I'm also guessing the next door neighbors won't notice that some of their dirt is missing.

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Update, Feb. 1: the planters are no longer daily repositories of cigarette butts, tissues and empty water bottles, but people do occasionally drop items in there. Just when I think progress is being made, some noodnink drops a soda can in one of them.345

It's all in the cards

I've been conducting a little experimental observation the past week.

It started with simple curiousity about all the pre-paid phone cards one sees lying around on the ground but it's really about the larger issue of littering in KSA. I got the idea from reading Susie of Arabia's article about the clean up effort on the corniche in Jeddah. As I opined at the time to Susie, I heartily endorsed the idea but felt confident that anything they cleaned up would be back in duplicate the next week.

So here's what I did:

For the admittedly arbitrary period of 4 days, I stopped and picked up every single pre-paid plastic phone card on the ground in my path between my apartment and my workplace, a distance of about one km. I stopped after 4 days because I had gone over the slightly varying routes 8 times (round trip) and found that the average number of cards was decreasing only slightly. I figured the first couple days I was picking up cards from several previous weeks but by the third day it was mostly new cards.

My hypotheses going in were (1) that the assortment of cards would reflect the market shares of the three local providers: STC, Mobily and Zain, in that order, (2) that the value of the cards would be evenly distributed among 10s, 20s, 30s and so on. [Note: 10 SR=$2.67 US]

I was also simply curious about how many cards there really were. I asked a few colleagues who hazarded guesses of 7-10 cards per day.

The actual average was 41.75, with slightly higher numbers on the first and second days.

Here's what my collection looked like after 3 days:

The sharp-eyed among you will note that my initial two hypotheses were gloriously disconfirmed.

While STC dominates the market for phone cards in the Malaz district, Zain clearly trumps Mobily, which is actually the market's second-in-command for overall telecoms market share.

Why is that? Well, as a colleague mentioned, it seems that Mobily has better deals for post-paid service, leaving STC and Zain as the price-leaders for pre-paid service. I can't vouch for that but it's certainly suggested by the numbers:

STC: 68%
Zain: 20%
Mobily: 12%

I was also wrong about the distribution of phone card values which were completely dominated by the 10 and 20SR cards:

SR 10: 77%
SR 20: 17%
SR30: 2%
SR 50: 3%
SR 60: 0.5%
SR 100: 0.5%

Essentially 10 and 20 SR cards comprised 87% of the pre-paid cards left on the ground.

It's important to remember that these figures represent cards carelessly or deliberately left on the ground, not the total number of cards purchased, some of which are undoubtedly dropped in the trash. So it may well be that the numbers tell us more about how the mixture of the army of foreign blue-collar or subsistence workers and middle-class native Saudis dispose of trash than the population as a whole.

In other words, this doesn't say anything about what percentage of cards are put in trash versus dropped, or what the true distribution of card values is.

Be that as it may, it's clear that residents and passers-by in Malaz buy the cheapest cards available and, from what I can personally observe, think no more about dropping a card once it's been scratched than they think about a fly once it's shooed from their arm. Once a card has been scratched and used, it is no longer in the customer's attention span and seems to simply fall from his hand like so much lint.

In fact, I asked one gent, with as much politeness as I could muster, why he dropped his card instead of throwing it in the trash. He replied quite matter of factly, "That's how we do it here."

I asked another guy whom I found buying a 10SR card at the bakalla (mini mart) why he bought that value instead of something higher. He said, "It's how I control my phone calls. If I got more, I'd just use more."

It's a bit tricky to calculate how many minutes one gets from a given phone card given that different providers have different rates and SMS charges are different from voice calls, not to mention the variety of services like prayer time notifications, but I'd venture to say that a 10SR card (worth, as noted, about $2.70 US) yields about 18-20 minutes of telephoning or 40 text messages.

Of course many of the dropped cards can be found in the immediate vicinity of the bakallas but a surprising number are found up and down the neighborhood streets. The reason for this, as I observed, is that a customer buys a card and then walks down the street scratching to get the code and re-charging his phone and then drops it when he's done, which may be a block and a half away.

As I was discussing this with a colleague, he ventured a further opinion about phone usage in the kingdom. According to his theory, Indians are the big texters, Pakistanis won't text but will call, and Bangladeshis use a sort of missed-call system to convey information like "on my way home," thus avoiding call charges. I can't vouch for any of this; just tellin' what I hear. Americans simply lose their phones a lot. And of course Saudi students usually have two phones -- one that the family knows about and one for...other uses.

Ecologically, however, I'd say the cards are a disaster, considering the amount of plastic involved for a useful life of 20 seconds, not including the resources needed to create the cards and truck them to the points of sale. And don't forget the plastic sheaths each card is wrapped in. Once the number has been scratched, the card becomes useful as...nothing.

One thing that some vendors do is provide a register receipt with the re-charge number instead of a plastic card. I'm sure the customers drop the register paper just as freely as the plastic, but the paper is a bit more biodegradeable.

_______________________________________________

Here's a typical Zain card

At least the folks at Mobily give you a collectors' motive for not tossing out the cards.

And finally: a glimpse of the rare 100 SR (about $27 US) STC card!

1234

Camels are for hugging, not smoking

123

The ears have it

Abdulaziz?
Here teacher.
Abdulkareem?
Present!
Abdullah?
Here sir.
Abdulraheem?
Good afternoon Mister V.

As I continued to read the afternoon roll of Saudi students, through the various Abduls, Alis and Mohammeds, the noise level in the classroom of 30 variously interested English language learners continued to rise.

Having read the roster list thrice already that day for my other classes, I could feel my voice starting to get scratchy and a little hoarse as I raised my volume to reach over the din. And we hadn't even gotten into the annoying business of gerunds and past continuous tense.

Then it occurred to me. They're teaching me. And what they were teaching is that their attendance meant more to me than to them.

Which is patently untrue.

Whether a particular Khalid or Majed was in class that particular period really made no substantive difference to me. It was just a check mark (present) or a zero (absent) and a possible argument later in the week when they'd come to my office to ask for help (student code for "Please don't mark me absent"). They wouldn't win the argument.

The fact is, an absence means a lot more to Hussam than to me. Once he goes over the rather generous allowance of absences he is afforded in order to keep earning his stipend, it's all over for him.

So why was I shouting to be heard over the pre-gerund clamor?

I tried a little experiment. I started lowering my voice...

Ayman?
Here, Mister V.
Emad?
Present.
Ibrahim?
Right here teacher.

I lowered it further...

Mishal?
Present!
Nawaaf?
Here.

By the end of the alphabet I was practically whispering. No kidding. My voice was low enough that I could barely hear myself!

Without a noise meter I couldn't say whether the ambient noise had gone down. If so, I don't think it was by much. But some of these 21- and 22-year-olds were sitting in the very back row of the room and they could hear me just as well as if the room had one of those acoustic domes where you can hear someone whisper from 30 meters.

It was eerie. A face--Muadh, Nasser, Omar--would pop up from behind a screen of students saying "Here Mister V!"

From this I draw two conclusions:

1) Never underestimate the ability of young-eared Saudis to hear at a distance.
2) People hear what they need to hear.

It's nice to get a lesson from the students.

If only we have ears to hear it.

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