Meeting New People

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Today was a day for meeting people. Before I left and before I knew I was returning to Saudi, I received an email from a guy who lives in Seattle who had stumbled across my blog. It turns out that his boss asked him in a meeting if you would be willing to go to Saudi Arabia on an assignment at Aramco. Bob thought his boss was putting him on. He wasn’t. Does any of this sound familiar?

Bob had never traveled outside of the US, except to Vancouver, Canada and that hardly counts as out of the US (apologies to all Canadians who are reading this). He received no cultural information and was a bit overwhelmed. His wife was a bit worried too.

Fortunately a few emails from me put him at ease and the blog helped give him a sense of what to expect. Three weeks ago, I found out I was returning and getting here a week after Bob. We quickly established we were both in Steineke Hall (the hotel/dorm here at Dhahran, Aramco) and all of sudden we realized we could meet in person!

Today we met for breakfast and again for lunch. Bob has done well! He has eaten a traditional meal on the floor at a Saudi’s home, slept on an drilling platform within sight of Iran, and has learned a lot in a short amount of time. He even had sheep testicles, which he would like people to know do NOT taste like chicken!

Today I also met four new PDI Consultants (two of them were here in February. Our cast of PDI’ers for this time includes: Glyn from Australia and Pat from Florida (the two who were here in February); Don from Minneapolis (an extremely interesting guy who was one of the founders of PDI and who officially retired in 2000, but obviously still is doing this stuff); Adrian from London; Werner from Brussels, Belgium; Eric from Geneva, Switzerland.

They Aren’t Problems, Just Opportunities

We worked about four hours today, even though it’s the weekend here. We did a test run for tomorrow’s first assessment center and here are the problems, I mean opportunities, we faced:

• Someone (one of the consultants) locked the file cabinet where the PC’s, router, and hard drive are stored. We didn’t have a key.
  
  
• Six PC’s were shipped from Minneapolis to use: They looked like they were thrown off a very high cliff. Pieces were missing and one screen was totally fried. It reminded me of those old Turistor Luggage commercials.
  
  
• Werner doesn’t use a qwerty keyboard. The ones in Belgium have the letters in totally different places. He was not amused.
  
  
• I didn’t know the ID’s and Passwords of the “new” computers so I couldn’t even get to Windows.
  
  
• I couldn’t get the router and hard drive to work.
  

And we haven’t even started day 1 of the first session! The good news is that we resolved all of the problems and we are ready (we think) for tomorrow.

Did I mention that the Travel Blog site has crashed and they lost all photos uploaded in the last two weeks?

Maybe I’m just storing up some good luck for tomorrow!

Sorry about the lack of photos. It’s been very dusty since I’ve been here due to another sand storm so there hasn’t been very much to photograph, but I will try to improve. Because let's face it; it's a whole lot more fun to look at photos than read words. Admit it, you were thinking that too.

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Comments

[Jessica]

Isn't it nice to know that somethings are the same no matter where you are? :)

[Jessica]

*some things

[Tiner]

some things
As Jess says, some things ARE the same where ever you go, but apparently not qwerty keyboards! (Is that their official name? Never heard it before, but I like it)