You know, sometimes I just don’t understand why there isn’t much thought or heart that goes into projects, especially multi-million dollar projects. Let’s look at the Zig Zag tower. I own 4 apartments in this project. Why did I invest? For a few reasons. I loved the design. It’s a unique building (the world’s tallest leaning residential structure), the views were beautiful, and the location was perfect (close to westbay and the pearl, but out of the way of traffic). Sadly it seems as though that’s the only reason to like it.

We’re now in 2010 and I’m still waiting on it to be finished. I’m going to list a few things that piss me off.

1) The garbage chute room is disgusting. I had to complain directly to Dar because some workers kept using it as a toilet and pissing on the floor! Why the hell would they piss on the floor?! It was cleaned but its filthy again and to be honest, even if it was clean, it still looks ugly. (Cement floor, peeling walls, dents in the metal chute).

2) The underground parking looks like a war zone! There are leaks all over the place, it’s dirty, there’s garbage on the floors, cracks all over, holes in the floor, the parking spaces are cramped, and three out of the four entrances are STILL closed….

3) They made us PAY for a parking spot. Does that make sense? The government should have FORCED them to give us one. The parking spots were 50,000 QR, it’s not like someone would own a place (or even rent) and not have a car in Qatar.

4) I’m still waiting for them to finish fixing issues with one of the apartments.

5) The building gym is smaller than my living room. The equipment is old and useless. It’s not a gym, more like a locker room!

6) I’m tired of smelling the neighbours food through the vents.

7) The quality of fixtures and tiles is poor. The marble floor is made of the cheapest marble money can buy.

The hallways look like a 20 year old hospital’s hallway.

9) The damn fire alarms go off 2 times a day for no reason! (Dar says “There’s an apartment with 12 indians living in it and they cook with fire”) What?! It’s against the law to have so many people in there and I DOUBT they’re cooking 24 hours a day!

10) Two to three elevators are always down for maintanence. TWO of them had a sign saying “Down for maintanence due to water leakage on electricity” FOR TWO MONTHS NOW! (It’s also scary that there’s water leaking into the electricity of the elevator.

11) The elevators were advertised as ‘high speed elevators’. They ‘were’ fast… now it looks like they’ve turned down the speed because it’s sooooo slow….

I ended up renovating my apartments so that they’d be at the level I had expected them to be.

Now there’s a few things to talk about besides what I mentioned.

1) Shouldn’t the government get involved to make sure this project is perfect? Why you may ask? Well if this is the first major residential project, if it’s a peice of crap, then won’t investors lose confidence in the quality of other projects?

2) Doesn’t the owner of the project care? If MY name was on it, I’d like people to know they can trust me; I’d like people to know that MY projects were all about quality.

3) Does the company that owns the project REALLY need to cut corners? I feel like the tower is already 10 years old!

I can go on and on… I’ll save my breath for later…

I’ll end this with saying that Zig means ‘to poo’ in Arabic. Zag means ‘Poo’ed’ in arabic. I’ll leave you to think of another word for Zig Zag.

I’m very disappointed people… I work almost from the morning ’til night almost every day. It’s been very tiring -_-; However the day started with an awesome text message from my cousin. “Tekken 6 is out now! They released it early in Qatar before the rest of the world.”.

No way, I thought, Qatar… first…? I’m not complaining! So I rushed off to the store after work and bought it for 240 QR. Got home and was ready to play as my favourite Character Lei Wulong. My heart was torn out… they ruined the game… this is the SIXTH installment and they ruined it….

Now I’m a Street Fighter and Tekken Fan. When Tekken 5 came out they had already changed Lei’s moves a bit but I adapted easily, but with Tekken 6 they’ve near changed him into a completely different character. Circle, X then hold up used to do three triple acrobatic kicks in a row, now it’s Front, Circle, X, then keep tapping circle for example.

1) I don’t like the new menu
2) Most characters speeds have been changed (Lee is slower, Lei is slower, Bruce is faster, Gun Jack is TOO fast etc…)
3) Lei’s moves have changed! The essential buttons are no more… meaning I have to learn new combos
4) Theres a stupid new ‘Rage’ bar, that makes you stronger when you’re life is low meaning that a beginner can end up getting smashed, get rage, and then kill you…
5) Lei doesn’t kick people up high anymore for a combo unless you change your ground stance, which takes too long.
6) There are too many juggles
7) Seems like the only playable character is a Fat guy named Bob that moves faster than a ninja….
A stupid new character who’s head is a bomb, has jetpack wings, can shoot off her arms, and also eject a chainsaw…
9) The distance between characters is unmeasurable… you get hit even though the opponent doesn’t touch you ‘physically’….

I know I know, I usually talk about some important stuff… but this got to me… I hardly play games anymore but this was supposed to bring back memories

I’m on the phone right now.  Oh it’s alright I’m on hold again. I’ve been calling Qtel so that I can get them to sort out my Mobile Broadband.

Here’s a riddle, when is mobile broadband, not mobile broadband? Think about that one for a while. I waited on the phone for 15 minutes (my times are not exaggerated) until someone answered the phone. When I did get an answer, I explained that I was paying 400 QR for the unlimited package and had only downloaded around 6gb (in almost a month) and my internet speed was down to 800bytes (yes! 800 super fast bytes!). I was supposed to be getting 3g speeds 3.2mps. I wasn’t.

I couldn’t even stay connected to messenger without it disconnecting every few moments. I couldn’t even upload an image to change something on the website because it was taking so long.

So the guy tells me that he checked the system and everything is fine. What IS this ‘system’? QTel always talks about the ‘system’ like it’s some super omnipotent being…. “I don’t care what the system says, I’m telling you that it’s taking me 10 minutes to load up google.”. Alright sir, can you please check www.speedtest.qa ? (Qtel obviously thought ‘hey let’s set up a speedtest.net server and brand it). I did, it was telling me that my internet speed was 1mbit. NO FREAKING WAY. So I explain that it doesn’t make sense to test a server in Qatar, how many websites are in Qatar? Unless I’m going to be surfing Qtel.com.qa every day, it’s useless! I also found it strange that when I’m on the phone with the guy it gives me good speeds.

The guy explains that he can’t help me and that he’ll connect me to a technician. While on hold (for 10 minutes), I decide to re-run the speedtest. Guess what? 560ms ping and .08mpbs. Oh that’s more honest now. The phone is finally answered. It took me almost 10 minutes of repeating to explain to him that he’s reading me the manual for windows and that I was on a mac. Yep if you thought these guys were thinking, you’re wrong, they just flip to Chapter 9 “How to answer a question without knowing what’s going on.” and read it.

So the guy then tells me that I should try flipping to 2G. I don’t know how 2G is going to be faster than 3G but maybe he wants to test if it’s a 3G thing. Nope. Doesn’t work. So on minute 59 he tells me that today’s friday and that the network is being hammered. Wait what…? I ask him if every Friday was going to be like this and his response? “Was it like this last Friday”. I actually almost laughed a bit because his sarky response (I like sarcasm). “Alright, well I dont want to call back tomorrow and he says “it’s Saturday” and I call on Monday and he says “It’s September”.” So I ask the guy to put a note on the system so I don’t have to go over all of this again and again.

Problem? Solved? Nope. Just wasted an hour. Not like I have a life or anything right?

How long did my phone call last? 1 hour and 34 seconds.

So let me start this off by saying that I worked with a great team. I worked for a subsidiary of QNB. Independent (to an extent), challenging, and did I mention that there were great people to work with?

My issue is probably with the bank itself in ‘essence’. I cannot find fault with most people (note I said most). However since joining, there was always the feeling of confusion, no not from my end, but from QNB itself. Nobody really knew what they were doing completely; I talk about the people I interacted with of course and this post is only meant to highlight my experience.

What made the experience a bit sad was that QNB actually treated staff worse that customers. Now if the level of service given to customers is quite low, you can only imagine what staff get. No special rates, hardly any exceptions, processes are a bit more difficult and you have to pick up your account debit card 4 months after you apply in a leaky toilet under head office. Alright so I made the last one up, but that’s how it feels.

After quitting, I decided to take the professional route and stay a month in order to take care of the work left over and to ensure that the projects (and clients) that I had on my plate were somewhat worked on to a satisfactory level; afterall, that is the right thing to do. Many Qataris simply leave the next day, but oh no, I had to let morals get in the way. It was a foolish mistake.

I had left to Japan when I had the lovely suprise of seeing that my cards were cancelled. Yep, I had a month left, went on leave for a few days only to find that I couldn’t use my cards half way through. After returning to Qatar, I saw that I couldn’t use any of my cards! Calling up customer service was of no help because they simply said they didn’t know what the problem was.

So I waited a bit over a week and then finally decided that I didn’t want to have my money in a hidden account and went off to the main branch to set up a new account. They gave me a few papers to sign, signed them, and left with the card. Not bad, I get a debit card on the spot. The next few days didn’t go on too well since it took a while for it to link up to my online banking. It was a hassle, I had to create a new account and transfer funds, but it was over and done with. The end of the month came and my team gave me a nice lunch to say goodbye. That’s pretty nice.

Last pay and I’m out of there. Nope. No pay. Yep no pay for me. QNB didn’t put me on the pay roll. They told me that they would pay my salary 21 days after I quit. Wait what?! I have a mortgage to pay… I worked for a whole month for what? To get paid two months later? I tried called the AGM since he was a friend but he was on vacation for 3 weeks.

So I send off an email to a person I considered a friend at HR and ask him to please ‘help a brutha out man!’ He was always friendly to me, and in fact, he told me to call on him if I ever needed help. I explained the situation and got an reply “Isn’t this your signature”, with an attachment to an account cancellation form. The form was dated the 19th! They cancelled my account BEFORE I signed that form. I was GIVEN that form when I created a new account! Plus canceling my original account is against policy! It should have been converted to a customer account… Guess they follow policy when it suits them.

I explained that to him and he cced in someone saying “please follow up”. Nice…. thanks Qatari bro. You really helped me out there. //end sarcasm. So the guy (who also works in QNB HR) goes an reactivates my old account… no I don’t want my old account reactivated… Just send my salary to the new one… No he can’t do that… So Saturday comes a long and I get a text that my account is 10+k overdrawn. What? Wasn’t my account reactivated so that I could get my salary and now I’m overdrawn?

The geniuses reactivated an empty account which automatically charged me an ‘empty account’ fee, then charged me some sort of interest, and then pulled out the mortgage. To make matters worse, the mortgage statement didn’t even reflect that! What the hell?!

So the office manager sends an email to HR on my behalf asking them to please sort this out. What does she get as a reply? “It’s a customer account now so it’s not our business. Let him go to main branch.”. What the F~~~~~ I don’t even want to use a badword. I don’t want to waste my time.

So now I have to go BACK to the main branch, get them to waive these fees and sort crap out. How nice of them! Who wants to bet I’ll be speaking to someone who either a) doesn’t care or b) ‘can’t do anything because it’s out of his hands’.

Moral? Sometimes you just can’t be too nice…  *sighs* No regrets from leaving a bank that couldn’t at least show me an inch of compassion. I guess I lasted as long as I did because of a few reasons, the CEO was an intersting person, one of the GM’s was a supporting individual, and I met some amazing staff at the bank. It’s thanks to them that I cannot say that all my time was a waste.

Note: Let there be no misunderstanding. My time in my line of work was great. I learned from my team, I managed to work on fantastic and amazingly huge transactions, and it opened my eyes to many things, it’s just that I wish things went a bit easier. We return to that classic sentence which is meant to be words of support but often get considered words of despair “Life’s not easy”.