Technology today has made our lives so much more comfortable and quite easier to get a… heart attack episode.
To explain what I mean we have to go back a couples of decades.
Those who have been working in this paper much before me speak of a time when they had to park their cars in the desert and walk through the sands every day to get to their desks.
Usually, expatriates either tend to exaggerate the great adventures they went through when they first arrived here or it is sometimes a selective memory loss and they go through life believing that certain things really happened to them.
But I had to believe my colleagues when one day I found a photograph of the office building hanging on the wall at the HR department. It was taken some 30 years ago and shows our building smack in the middle of the Dubai sands.
I am sure it must have been a nice, quiet time way back in those days, as there was no paid parking.
Now almost every evening, right around the deadline time, when it turns so deadly silent, I can hear an “aaarrrghh” from my colleague who invariably forgets to extend her parking time.
It used to get a little distracting when you are seriously thinking of what word to use to describe the oppressive heat outside in your report, when you hear, not one, but two, people screaming about parking tickets.
My second colleague was sure that the parking ticket inspector had memorised her car number plate and was giving her fines on purpose.
“I was only five minutes late,” she would say. “I met him one day and he was so mean-looking,” she said.
As I said, technology is wonderful; it saves us so much time and effort that we can dedicate ourselves to more useful pursuits. Paying for parking has been made so much easier and all we have to do is dial a number on our smartphone and send our ‘cash’.
But every evening my colleagues would be found still struggling and fumbling with their tiny smartphone keyboards trying to extend the parking time before the inspector arrived.
I once saw the inspector and found that his job too had become so much easier thanks to technology. He was sitting in a fancy red SUV and looking at a hand-held monitor. Apparently, it tells him who has extended the parking time without paying, consequently eliciting an evil smile on his face.
As I always park in the free parking spots just a few metres away, I never had such a problem about paying fines needlessly, until one month the heat and the humidity got really oppressive.
And unfortunately, I don’t have a car that warns me what the temperature is outside, so that you can gloat at the melting pedestrians and take necessary precautions as applying sun block and putting on designer Fendi glasses before stepping out.
“Take an umbrella,” said my wife when I complained of the heat. To add salt to the wound she told me of her colleague’s car which not only starts remotely but switches on the air-conditioning so that by the time you open the door, it is blissful inside.
I could never think of carrying an umbrella for that short walk from the car to the office, because it looks so uncool. So I parked in the paid parking slot and when the time ran out, I extended the time sitting comfortably at my desk, until a message said I could extend the time anymore.
By the time I found two dirham coins, ran down the hall, down the steps and wiped the humid moisture off my glasses, the inspector had come and gone and had left a note on my windshield.
