Nick Hardcastle

I am standing beside an ATM in the Rashid Mall in al Khobar. The machine welcomed me politely – “Hello Nicholas Adrian.” If only good manners were a sure sign of efficient service. Each time I put my card into one of the machines here in Saudi Arabia my heart quickens and my stomach ties itself into a tight knot. Holding my breath, I type in the pin number, request money and wait.

Some years ago a friend of mine was traveling in India. She went to a bank in a provincial town to change US dollars, a process that would typically take her more than an hour as she visited the different counters to collect forms, signatures, deposit her dollars, pick up a receipt and finally deliver this to a cashier who would hand over the currency. Frustrated by the process she told the clerk, “You know, in my country, I simply take my card and put it into a hole in the wall and get money out straight away.” She was told, “Madam, I think that you have been in the sun too long. You should sit down. This is just not possible.”

Saudi ATMs are everywhere, but sometimes “just not possible” would be a preferable alternative to the service offered. Three years ago five hundred pounds disappear from my account without trace, only to reappear two months later with no excuse or explanation. I have had my card cancelled without warning and my pin number changed. One transaction was processed and a receipt issued, but no money was forthcoming. On another occasion the ATM spat out my money with an aggressive grating noise, only to yank it back out of my hand again like an over eager bulldog. Fortunately I managed to catch the edge of the notes and was able to drag them from the machine one by one. I often use the ATM next to Speedcash in town. In December a maintenance team had reversed the keypad for some reason. It was then that I discovered that I remember my pin by a pattern of rather too well practised finger movements, for once the number pad was upside down my brain went to mush. I walked around town for a full hour trying to recall the number, without success. I even tried typing it into different machines, but it was of no use, my memory was corrupted and I began to worry about early onset Alzheimer’s. At least when the system goes down completely as the bank “updates its software to improve customer convenience”, you know that your money is safe.

Or at least you would think so. My bank has double billed me, twice lost electronic transfers and closed down my account, all without satisfactory explanation. Sometimes I can withdraw money at the counter using my card, other times I have to present my original Iqama. Once I was told to go and use the ATM as they had run out of cash at the counter. When I complained that this wasn’t practical as the ATM would only give me SR5000 a day, the clerk suggested that I draw out the rest of my money the day after. So each time I enter the Saudi Hollandi Bank it is with a feeling of dread. I try not to go very often, which is just as well as they are only open for an hour in the afternoon, and that at a time which makes it almost impossible for us to get there from school.

With so many expatriate workers living in Saudi you would think that sending money abroad would be a simple matter. Having lost three thousand pounds in fluffed electronic transfers, I abandoned e-banking and now go to Speedcash. This is a branch of SAMBA, one of the world’s largest banks and voted Bank of the Middle East this year. Here, for a fee of fifty Riyals (about six pounds fifty), you can wire money to many countries in the world. So far it has been reliable and the exchange rate is good. The only drawbacks are that processing each transaction takes the clerks about ten minutes and the queue is always huge. The obvious solution would be to increase the number of clerks on the counter. There are, after all, half a dozen windows and terminals available. But no, this is Saudi Arabia, and so there is a long queue and only ever a couple of clerks working slowly.

Women here are not expected to queue with the men – there is a separate window for them and a club wielding security guard to keep the men at bay. No clerk though. Eventually one of the clerks serving the men will drag himself over, reluctantly abandoning his favoured computer terminal.

For the men, a typical visit to Speedcash will take an hour or more, and twice that at busy times such as Christmas, Ramadan or Eid. The solution is to take a woman along and give her your form and cash. This is queue jumping to an extent that, as an Englishman, I find completely unacceptable. I use it all the time of course, hypocritically. For the last two years, LuAnne has been making my transfers for me. After she leaves I am not sure what I will do. Perhaps I will have to go back to the technique Mart and I used some years ago – when faced with a particularly long queue, we caught a passing Filippina and paid her to do our transactions for us.

My MacBook Pro started making a horrid whining noise this afternoon. Something like a sleepy mosquito. Not a good sign. Whilst I really want to buy a new computer, I don’t want this one to die. The thought of all the lost data sent me scurrying off for a new hard drive to back everything up. The Apple store were all out so we headed for Extra, dodging kamikaze drivers trying to beat their way to the shops before prayer time.

Extra, the largest electronics and white goods store in Al Khobar, would make an excellent case study for anybody wanting to study customer service. Their staff are quite exemplary.

I bought a Western Digital MyBook – a thousand gigs for a hundred pounds. Just think, that is ten pence per gig!

It was prayer time when we arrived. We bumped into an old friend at the door. Lu asked him how his ‘lovely wife’ was. They are getting divorced. I walked away, chuckling to myself.

The hard drives were there for the taking, on the shelves. Perhaps that’s why they were all trussed up in security tags, although the size of the box would make a most noticeable lump under all but the most capacious of thobes.

The cashier showed no interest in removing the tag and was quite happy to sell the drive to me, tag included. The alarm went off as I walked out of the store, but the security guard waved me through, looked in the bag and stamped my receipt to say it was OK.

When I eventually managed to hack through the steel cables with my scissors I was rewarded with a red flashing light and the most ear splitting alarm – like a smoke alarm on steroids. Two hours later it is still going off, languishing in the bottom of a bucket of water. If it doesn’t stop by tomorrow, I am not sure what I shall do with it.

I have been wanting to try my hand at full screen QTVR for the last few months and have slowly been amassing the skills and equipment necessary for it. I think that it is still quite a specialist field as it is quite hard to get together all the information. I don’t think I have ever had to spend so much time searching for things on the internet. There is a huge amount of information available, but so little is of good quality.

The work that inspired me was a virtual tour of the wonderful Chateau Chenonceau. When I have made something that good I will be happy. My first attempts are not so polished.

I started with my living room which you can see here, and then worked on a group of photographs I took in March on Kala Patthar during our Everest Base Camp Trek with the kids. I am quite pleased with the results to far. Now I need to work out how to optimize them to bring the file size down a bit. They load at a reasonable rate, even on my hopeless internet connection in Saudi, but it still could be better.

I’ve just managed to buy a 16mm fisheye lens from the States, and so when that arrives, I think I am going to try to do a 360 degree tour of Al Khobar and Dammam. I wonder how long that will stay on the web before the Saudi authorities block it?

I was standing in the gents toilets, aiming at the small deep hole down which Martin Mullen lost his designer sunglasses some years ago. Suddenly my feet were getting splashed. I checked my aim and found it accurate. I stood on my left foot, aiming carefully and stared in disbelief at the wave coming from the next stall.

It could have been worse. The chap was washing his hair with the bathroom hose. We both came out at the same time. He looked at me strangely as I rinsed my feet in the wash basin, but as he was holding his head under the hand drier and dabbing his thobe with paper towels, he hadn’t much room to comment.