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Uploading your CV or resume

14 April 2010

The online versions are often harder to read. Really.

This week I’ve read, scanned and skimmed 276 uploaded resumes. Yes, I’m in currently involved in the joyless and thankless task that is recruitment.

It’s a tiresome thing to have to upload your CV to an impersonal website. With the advent of outsourcing came the growth of crappy recruitment agencies and the disappearance of the humane from Human Resources.

Instead of a quick chat over the phone to clarify job location or verify desirable criteria, today applicants are faced with faceless websites that even the best marketing and copywriters can’t change then from what they really are: a people shredder.

Incomprehensible formatting = declined application

I’ve just spent the better part of two full day’s of work churning through candidates’ resumes. Two days after which I have incredibly bleary eyes and no longer any desire to drink just one more cup of instant coffee.

Very few of the applicants are going to the next stage of the recruitment process, primarily since they did not meet the essential criteria. However, after ploughing my way though countless screens of data, I think it’s worth making a couple a suggestion to those of you out there who do upload your CV from time to time.

Most importantly, keep two versions of your CV.

Strip down and go naked

The first can be that MS Word version with fabulous, colourful and inventive formatting. I enjoy perusing a considered CV that contains information in a consistent manner and that present a logical flow. Even better, it’s pleasant to come across a CV that has a personal touch; a dash of colour or a non-standard title font. This is the version you email as an attachment or present in person to that sour-faced recruitment agent who’s only after you for the commission he’ll make.

The other version should be naked. A stripped down, de-formatted, bare-bottomed resume that contains no quirks at all. The best way to create this is to copy your fancy word-processed number and paste it into Notepad. Hey presto, just watch the three hours of font selection and border choice disappear as the bones of your life are laid bare in black and white Courier font.

This stripped-bare edition should be what you upload. If you can make sense of the Notepad version, you can bet I’ll be able to work my way through it easily as well.

As I became progressively tired during the course of my second evening reviewing the resumes, it struck me that I was declining applicants without remembering any information about them. Why? Because at 1am I could no longer be bothered translating enigmatic computer code to decipher what had originally been expressed.

Sad, but true. At least 50-odd applicants didn’t make it because their unreadable tables, weird font choices, underlining, strikethroughs and a myriad of other formatting selections didn’t translate well during uploading. I refused to struggle any longer and just simply declined the applicant.

For those of you who upload your CV regularly, it’s certainly worth considering half an hour’s extra toil to save a neat, clean and boring Times Roman file. At least it promises to get you closer to the second step of the recruitment process.

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The joy of English spelling

13 April 2010

To learn pronunciation from a dictionary, you have to learn a separate alphabet, the IPA. It's not fun.

Since the world we live in is strange and unfathomably difficult to comprehend, it seems proper that English, once confined to a barabric, rain-sodden people of northern climes, should rise to the status of lingua franca and make life infernal for the hundreds of millions of students who attempt to learn it as a foreign or secondary language.

And since language seems to raise the passions of people almost as much as religion or sport, it’s often a subject best left to those who love composing screeching rants to newspaper editors.

English spelling is, at best, laughable

You cannot escape the fact that English spelling is at best, retarded. French spelling is possibly even more so, though as current French politics relegate la langue francaise to the neophytes of religious bigotry and sour grapes, English is set to reign supreme for a while yet. For English speakers who happen to speak another language, one of the most startling revelations about our own language is its almost arbitrary spelling. And while I could wax lyrical about how easy it is to learn Turkish spelling conventions or the almost child-like orthography of Castilian, I’ll attract too much hate mail and virus-laden spam. This will make me tired.

English spelling conventions are an approximate visual representation of the spoken word. And often, of the spoken word as it was uttered several hundred years ago. Even without delving into a dissertation on historical linguistics, it doesn’t take much to conclude that when ‘enough’ was written for the first time, it pretty much didn’t sound like the word as we pronounce if today. Otherwise, common sense would have dictated ‘inuff’, or else something close to it. The ridiculousness of English spelling is easily apparent from a lesson my tortured English teacher once gave in high school, where he scrawled ‘bough’, ‘rough’, ‘through’ and ‘ought’ onto the board to enlighten us a little further on the capriciousness of our orthography. He never did explain how things got that messed up, but he was like that.

How to spell correctly and influence people

So here is a very short list of suggestions for those who really want to discover the path to spell English words ‘correctly’.

Decide on American or English spelling. Your words, your choice. Don’t let anyone persuade you otherwise. Like your football team, make the choice and then stick with it for life.

Secondly, purchase a big, fat dictionary, one that you’ll be proud to own and that you’ll keep as a handy reference book. A big, fat dictionary might be either the Oxford English or the Longmann American. I have both and I worship them equally.

Thirdly, a search on Google cannot help you spell with great certainty. That compound adjective or doubled-up vowel for which you seek clarification online will be spelled with a great deal of variety by a large number of people. One dictionary, one reference. Stick with it.

Next, a word processing spellchecker can facilitate your task but it cannot replace your big, fat dictionary. Not yet, and not for a while longer. When it does, I’m out of a job.

Further, never listen to anyone who states that such-and-such is the only correct spelling. The person is most likely an extremist, and quite frankly, we need to educate these types before the twenty-first century breeds more of them and spells the end of civilisation (love my pun).

Love your English, whatever it may be

Lastly, don’t be too precious about spelling. Just be consistent. My good friend is a talented designer, by nature is an accommodating and sensitive soul. Her online jewellery site contains a post on ‘Jewelry versus Jewellery‘. Since she sells fabulous creations online and across the world, Simone is smart enough to know that people might pass judgement on here site if they visit, say, the British English site from North America. She has it sorted.

It will already be evident if you’ve read this far that I do not use American English anywhere on my website. My choice. And though I suggest you own one big, fat dictionary, I possess 42 of them, in all shapes and sizes, colour and hues. They are my tools and that’s what I spend my day doing. Making sure that the spelling and grammar in a document are consistent and understandable to the greatest number of any given audience.

To finish, I do love the French. I’m just frustrated with the current course of events, where the government is taking a course against a significant portion of it own population. Dismal, really. But that’s for another post.

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Compound adjectives (are fun)

12 April 2010

Today I came across an advertisement from a national tourism authority that is promoting the azure waters, spectacular mountains and breath taking landscapes of this attractive Balkan getaway.

Unfortunately, though I’m no purist when it coming to language, breathtaking is the most appropriate form to use here. Even breath-taking appears awkward to my eyes, since the adjective has long been in use, perhaps to the point of cliche. The merged form is instantly recognisable to any native English speaker.

Still, compound words can cause everyone to be hesitant periodically, primarily since their form can change over time.

Compound words consist of two or more words that carry a new meaning. Some combinations begin life as two separate words, separated by a space, then move to a hyphenated form and eventually to a single word. Even so, hyphens are sometimes maintained in some compounds, especially where both components are multi-syllabic.

Here are a few guidelines to help you determine whether or not you really need that hyphen.

Compound adjectives formed from two adjectives, or noun plus adjective

Always place a hyphen between the two words, such as in sugar-free, stone-deaf, white-hot and bitter-sweet, regardless of whether the noun it describes precedes or follows the compound adjective.

Compound adjectives that are set phrases

However, a noun plus a noun, or an adjective plus a noun is less likely to be joined, as in the tax office report or an equal opportunity employer. That said, if the expression is modified further, a hyphen can be inserted where the meaning might become ambiguous, such as in annual tax-office report.

Compound adjectives with a participle

Forms such as a gut-wrenching film or school-supported facility usually take a hyphen, though I personally waver between inserting and omitting the hyphen. Depends on the time of day…

A compound adjective consisting of a participle or adjective preceded by an -ly adverb has no hyphenation, as in a fully functioning brain, while a compound adjective preceded by an adverb not ending in -ly takes a hyphen, as in a fast-paced marathon.

Should a compound of this kind be modified further, perhaps by very or extremely, a hyphen is not used, as in an extremely well written play or a particularly well known individual. The absence of a hyphen extend to compounds adjectives consisting of comparative or superlative adjectives or adverbs plus a participle, as in the least understood teacher.

Confused? Such is the work of an editor.

Compound adjectives that are adverbial phrases

These are always hyphenated, though I’ve seen enough in-house style guides to perceive that such usage is on the wane. For example, it is suggested to write up-to-date document and million-year-old fossil, even though my instinct tells me that this may become an obsolete usage as the movement towards minimal punctuation expands.

Personally, I don’t like the hyphens here, and the forms are so ubiquituous as to be recognisable without the hyphen, or italics for that matter.

Compound adjectives involving numbers

Use the hyphen, as in a eight-part documentary and a fifty-storey office building.

Compound adjectives containing capital letters

As with compound adjectives containing italics or quotation marks, omit the hyphen. Otherwise it’s overkill. A Federal Court jurisdiction, an ad hoc presentation and a ‘devil may care’ attitude are busy enough from a punctuation perspective to be understood clearly without a hyphen.

And that, in brief, is the joy of compound adjectives.

Back to the breath taking scenery of eastern Europe. Maybe it doesn’t look odd to you. The guidelines for English usage are just that. They are not rules. Using or omitting the hyphen rarely hinders comprehension. Time will sort that one out. Just as I still prefer to write awe-inspiring today, it’s likely that within years the hyphen will disappear here too.

To avoid the whole issue, avoid breathtaking and awe-inspiring and just go visit spectacular Montenegro. But their tousim authority really ought to have employed a more thorough editor.

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New sandals

11 April 2010

I kind of feel repulsed by shopping centres. Never liked them. Mostly, being in retail space reinforces the inferiority complex I have along with a certain frisson of je ne sais quoi: I don’t belong. I just don’t get it. I don’t understand why anyone would want to spend time in a cavernous concrete temple of artificiality, and anyway, what do people do once they get there?

I know that some indoor shopping centre contain bookstores, stationery shops and hardware stores, and I certainly enjoy wasting my time among shelves stocked with paper, calligraphy pens and drill bits. Lots of little things arranged together side by side, to form a magical whole. Whenever I’m roaming among aisles of glue and adhesives or comparing wall plug sizes, I always think about what it must be like to perform a stock take in this environment. Imagine spending your afternoon attempting an accurate count of erasers, bath plugs or Lonely Planet Guides?

Personally, I think working in retail would be a death sentence for me. Not only because of my poor social skills and unwillingness to sell anything to anyone, but because standing on my feet for eight hours a day seems is as appealing as a Los Angeles-Sydney non-stop flight seated next to a Philippine Roman Catholic nun. Which, by the way, happened to me. I have no desire to repeat the experience, and certainly not every day of my chosen career.

Still, some people choose to work in retail because they feel good about helping people and enjoy giving customer satisfaction. There is a infinitely small percentage of retail staff that can read me, who can feel the ‘stay away from me’ vibe’ which I emit whenever I start browsing. The remainder of retail workers can be divided into those who follow me unceasingly around the shop and those who look at my appalling dress sense and ignore me therewith.

The latter group of retailers are uniquely to be found in clothing and accessory shops. People working in clothes stores and I, well, we are mutual in our antipathy towards the other party. I consider fashion very low on the ‘list of things a human needs to achieve self-satisfaction and happiness’. It’s down there with ‘meeting a celebrity’ and ‘shaving every workday’. Luckily, human are a rich, varied and surprisingly disappointing species, so there are a plethora of types who couldn’t think of any place better to spend the day than ‘Gap’ or ‘Harvey Nichols’. Good, now you people can serve me.

However, don’t look at me like that. I know I look crap and I’ll never make it into Vogue, but to be fair, I think Anna Wintour would look good as a coat and Karl Lagerfeld is one of the reasons that the Taliban isn’t all wrong about western values. One of my closest friends once said that on a scale from one to ten in dress sense, I scored a zero. Luckily for me, I couldn’t give a toss.

However, I cannot live without sandals. And today I bought some. They are very special. The man told me how wonderful they looked and I asked him to be quiet because this would be the twentieth pair I’ve bought in my life. They just happen to be back in fashion now, so spare me the sycophantic obsequiousness. I’m wearing them about the hotel room because I can.

With any luck, sandals will be in fashion again for the new few years and at least once more in 2023, probably the next time I have to enter a clothing store. Of course, the irony is that my article on Istanbul shopping centres is the most read of all the online pieces I’ve written. Rubbish.

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Hotel art is distressing

10 April 2010

Could you fall asleep, knowing this was in the room?

This week I’m staying in a serviced apartment, something I’ve never done before.

I’m used to flea-ridden, squalid room with torn mosquito nets and a mattresses stuffed with chick peas, so naturally I’m still a little shell shocked after entering my impeccably clean, colour-coordinated room, replete with functioning washing machine, stack of fluffy bath towels and mini fire extinguisher.

Though it’s odd to spend a week in a hotel situated in the same city in which you are currently residing, such is my little adventure. To the friend who hurtfully inferred I may have been kicked out of my rented apartment for questionable hygiene issues, I state here that I am not a liberty to discuss my current predicament with you, but that you should refrain from making such ill-conceived remarks. They have been duly noted.

Still, apart from the genuine weirdness that comes from listening to children squealing up and down the corridor, the gyrating and pulsating foul-mouthed hip hop artist booming from the lounge speakers, and the hideous glow of a million halogen lamps, it’s the art that’s giving me a headache.

Last week, while waiting for a quote at the local print shop, I noticed one of those perky, snappy framed bit of philosophy that pollute so many public workspace. ‘It is disturbs you, it’s art.’ Well, most people disturb me and they’re not art. Most of them are just mistakes and the current product of evolution. Unfortunately, that sniff of intellectual pretence doesn’t hold up to the slightest questioning. You only have to cast a glance at the framed horror hanging in my temporary quarters. It disturbs me. It is vomit-worthy. Art it is not.

I know I’ve been guilty of the throwaway and capricious ‘Oh, I could’ve done that!’ in times past. But I couldn’t have done this schlock of puke, not even if I removed my eyes from their sockets before picking up the brush. Painting is perhaps not the most developed of the arts in the Islamic world (and here I’m assuming the artist is local), but there’s no reason to hang what amounts to a set of blood-drenched ropes across a gold leaf ECG screen in my place of repose.

And wouldn’t you know it? After staring menacingly at the painting for about three minutes, I decided that it had to go, stored next to the ironing board. Neither object was of any worth to me so I thought they could both stay out of sight during my stay, deep within dark bowels of the bedroom cupboard.

No sooner had I removed the painting from the wall, than my doorbell sounds and the Floor Manager’s cherubic visage fills the peep-hole. I’d barely made a sound! Still, he was here to check on my dry cleaning requirements but I couldn’t hide the picture, now seated, rather lonely, on the sofa. I explained to him how I am allergic to reds and oranges, though since my fully exposed suitcase resembles a fiery clementine, he simply eyed me suspiciously and took my shirts. Then looked back again. That time, I’m not sure what he was suggesting, so I shut the door in his face.

Apart from the disturbing non-art, I’m loving my serviced apartment.

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The Road leads to depression

4 April 2010

Well, it was better than trying to portay the cannabalism in the movie.

I’ve just returned from watching The Road, a film based on the Pulitzer prize-winning author’s novel of the same name. After finishing the 300 page book just under a fortnight ago, I was content to slump comfortably into my seat in the sparsely attended 6:30pm evening screening.

I knew the end of the world was coming

Since my formative years included the early 1980s, I was deeply affected by what I perceived as the reality of impending nuclear warfare. Long before SCUD missiles rained down iridescent over Kuwait City and later Iraq, I remember sitting on my back porch step on summer evenings, waiting for the Intercontinental Ballistic missile to smash my tadpole and stamp collection to smithereens. I was certain that the world would end during my teenage years. I sat through The Day After, Testament and War Games; three films that helped convince me I wouldn’t need to worry about dying of old age.

As it turned out, untrustworthy, warmongering governments have somehow managed to keep humanity from inducing its own end, long enough for the cinematic cycle to turn full circle. The camp ridiculousness of cinematographic fecal discharge such as The Day after Tomorrow and 2012 (maybe the most disappointing movie ever), has done nothing to educate any of us about the fragility of our existence.

A planet that can no longer sustain life

The Road is brilliant. No government in conflict, no statesmen posturing, no overly dramatic build up to a nuclear holocaust. The narrative simply starts post-apocalypse, and whatever did cause the end of civilisation, well, it wasn’t the concern of the movie.

Instead, it’s a tale of survival in a ash-laden, grey-streaked world of seared landscapes and charred industrial ruin. It’s Children of Men without the hope to carry you through. I could taste the filth of the polluted atmosphere, the falling specks of ash, the grime of unwashed human wreckage. The Road contains minimal action but loads of despair. What McCarthy imagines we become post-apocalypse is what we are already on our way to being. Inhuman. In a world without resources, we begin to consume ourselves.

Unlike the publicist who write the blurb on McCarthy’s book, I wasn’t ‘sustained by the love’ between the father and son. I just feel like my deepest teenage fears have come back to haunt me again.

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Why I love my passport

2 April 2010

The mark of a worthy passport is not having to collect the stamps in the first place.

Today I’m sitting in bed and chuckling to myself though the clock warns me it’s 5:30am, a time I assume has meaning in other people’s lives, but not mine.

Late yesterday morning a colleague at work informed me I needed to organise air tickets for two staff. They were required to travel to neighbouring Bahrain, just an hours’ flight away from Dubai International Airport. Rejoicing at the joy of e-ticketing that has come with the Internet, I was swiftly able to locate and reserve two seats for DXB-BAH, leaving at 7:15am the following morning and returning late in the evening on the same day.

Be thankful for a passport that give affords you unhindered travel

Still, it was never going to be as simple as that. You see, if all Consulates and Embassies warn us in an unreadable, minuscule font that the granting of a visa does not guarantee entry into the territory which the diplomatic office represents, those of us with passports from rich and powerful nations never consider, or rarely, that we may actually be denied entry.

This trait doesn’t belong to many citizens from less powerful or little-liked nations, or from countries deemed hostile to the dominant world order. One of my staff travels with an Indian passport, and he was already undoubtedly used to encountering the misplaced bureaucracy that comes with border crossings.

When I called the Bahrain Embassy in Abu Dhabi to learn the process for him to obtain a visa, I received a response that was unsure and hesitant. A e-visa could be issued within the next two weeks. Useless for a 7:15am flight the following morning. Could he obtain a visa on arrival at the airport? No, out of the question. Unless. If I could persuade the company in Bahrain where my colleague had an appointment to issue a formal, signed and stamped Letter of Invitation, it might just work. I started to feel constipated.

Five hours later I managed a smile

Though the last rays of the sun were already sinking past the gleaming spires of Dubai when I received the second attempt at a Letter of Invitation with accurate itinerary dates, passport numbers and correctly spelled names, I jumped a little excitedly that I’d managed to pull it off. He would be able to attend the training session in Bahrain.

but an hour ago, at 4:30, my colleague woke me from contented slumber. In the background I could hear the familiar noises of the airport departure hall, that continuous voice over system announcing a thousand flights to ten thousand bleary-eyed travellers taking the red-eye specials, dressed in suit and without any check-in luggage. ‘No need to tell me… you’re not going?’ Even before customs had the opportunity to scan and manhandle and glare condescendingly at him, the check-in counter steward had refused to issue a boarding pass. Why? Well, to some people and governments out there, your job title is an important thing.

I don’t what your job title is but have a good idea what I’d like to call you

Since with word ‘manager’ was nowhere to be seen on my colleague’s UAE residency permit, the check-in clerk believed he would be refused a visa on arrival in Bahrain. Does it really matter? Yes, to some people it clearly does.

I asked to speak with the airline staff member and knew that I wouldn’t be rolling back into my bed within the next half hour. Thanking another gift of technology, I took my mobile phone into the kitchen and prepared a fresh pot of coffee. I was already agitated so I thought I’d just help myself along a little more.

Somehow, and certainly not due to my bedside manners and endless charm, my colleague got to Bahrain. The day went well. Yet again, I am grateful for my passport. And must remember more often not to take it for granted. I am visiting Bahrain in less than a fortnight and won’t even have to think about obtaining a visa beforehand. Or should I? Nah, that kind of thing never happens to me.

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Why this sentence offends me

1 April 2010

Window shopping in Dubai

I’ve just finished reading an article that claims to investigate the increased application of social conduct laws in Dubai. The story commences, ‘It seems Dubai’s authorities are cracking down on public indecency in the city.’

Yeah, it seems they might be. Then again, it may not seem like that at all.

It’s a fair assumption that one of Dubai’s most prominent publications for the expatriate community would write about such a topical issue. After all, while the swank restaurants, luxury vehicles and sleek architecture place this metropolis partly in the sphere of western influence, it’s evident to any person with a shred of common sense that this society’s origins differ deeply to those of the international jet set quaffing cocktails in Jumeirah Lake Towers.

A lost opportunity

What could have been a thought-provoking investigation into the current barometer of tolerance of the scantily-clad and bejewelled women of Dubai turns out to be a series of possibilities based on nothing more than mere suggestion and inference. It’s a crap read.

Usually, even that wouldn’t bother me. Besides, the magazine clearly caters well to its readers and makes no claim to being a intellectual leader in news and current affairs. It’s a publication that informs its readership about the latest film releases, groovy hangouts in which to be spotted and whether Paris Hilton has recently been slutting about town. You get the idea.

Then I read this:

But the fact remains that this is a Muslim country and if someone takes offence to behaviour that conflicts with these laws and reports you, then you have committed a crime, whether or not plenty of other people do it and get away with it.

Put aside the fact that I’ve removed the phrase from the article and perhaps out of its context. Read the sentence again. And once more.

Yeah, show me your prejudice

What this says to me is that Dubai is a Muslim country. Here, the author states a fact I won’t argue with, since she’s right on the ball. Next, the author clearly means ‘break the law’ and not really ‘conflict with the law.’ So, what’s she’s saying is, should a person takes offence at my behaviour, action or deed, which contravenes the law, I have committed a crime, regardless of others who might exhibit the same behaviour yet not be convicted of the same crime.

So, let’s think of a law. Let’s take the ol’ favourite of monotheistic culture, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Killing contravenes the law. And so it ought to.

The sentence now reads: ‘if a person takes offence at the fact that I commit murder, I have committed a crime, whether of not other people get away with it.’ Umm, yeah.

You see where I’m going with this?

The true garbage-worthiness of this article comes from the niggling, ‘But the fact remains that this is Muslim country’. Hate it. It’s mean and it suggests the kind of thing I’d rather not think about people. To me, what the author is hinting at, whether subconsciously or not, is that living in a Muslim country of itself means modesty will be the overriding value, whether in dress, word or deed, and that somehow the laws are not consistently applied.

And that is not fair.

Try harder next time, or I’m assigning you to the fashion desk

Modesty is a relative term. And you’d have to be some kind of idiot to wear hot pants in a Dubai shopping mall and not really feel out of place. I say, wear what you want. And just like people on roller skates in public places should be drawn and quartered, a bikini worn off -beach almost anywhere is considered wrong and possibly offensive.

What could have been an educational, investigative exploration regarding the current application of social conduct regulations in Dubai tuns out to be a trash-heap, well-steeped in prejudice, which infers that the culture in which I reside could somehow be a little arbitrary and random regarding its application of laws with regards to its expat community.

I hope not.

After all, we are far superior to the locals, aren’t we?

Another reason to employ a good editor.

Or is it just me? That, I suppose, is possible too.

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Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

7 March 2010

Three months to get two-thirds of the way though a book...

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, The Story of Success has put me in sombre mood. Well and truly. I finished reading it last night ensconced in a corner of my local Lebanese restaurant, a place I go where I delude myself that the food is healthy and low on fat. Working my through both lentil soup and deep fried kebbeh, I also devoured the last hundred pages of Mr Gladwell’s book as quickly as I’d chomped through the first hundred.

It’s an intriguing read, perhaps more so for those of us who feel that, in some way or another, success has remained out of reach. It doesn’t mean I’m not happy with how my life has panned out thus far; indeed life seems to me a pretty good deal most of the time. It’s just that I’ve never believed I’ve achieved anywhere near what I should have by this stage in my life.

Gladwell makes easy reading. Whether it be his gripping style or the ability to make the reader understand that complex ideas can be clearly explained with a strong dose of common sense, Outliers nonetheless makes me feel that I may well have squandered a good part of my energies on frivolous tasks. Whereas success may have come if only I’d applied myself more assiduously to other problems.

Some factors are outside our control

First in the book is what Gladwell calls the ‘Matthew effect’, the presumption that success is not just a simple function of individual merit. Being born at the right time and in the right place has a lot to do with it, though in my case I require more time to think about how being born into a lower middle-class suburban Australian family at the beginning of the 70′s has shaped my life.

There are certainly many characteristics that I share with friends of similar age and background. Often, we are the first of our family to have undertaken tertiary studies, at a time when free education disappeared under the Australian Labour government and a creeping pay-as-you-go scheme commenced, allowing financially uneducated students to incur massive amounts of debt that would eventually be returned to the State through the taxation system. Most of my friends have also continued to pursue postgraduate courses, or at least seem dedicated to what educators are now calling lifelong learning. We enrol in refresher, part-time, community college and a whole host of other personal interest classes on a variety of subjects.

10,000 hours? Not sure I’m there yet

Secondly, we all unanimously worked our way through university, often finishing a shift a the local restaurant before returning home to scrawl out that paper on Wuthering Heights before facing our prickly and turgid tutor at 8am the following morning. It didn’t strike me then, but it does now, that while I loved traipsing about the filthy vegetarian cafe in which I toiled, often until 2am, I should probably have been deliberating imperfect subjuntives and trawling my way though Greenbaum’s University Grammar of English. I didn’t put in enough hours doing the right stuff and I evidently didn’t accumulate the 10,000 hours that Gladwell claims might have made me an expert in my chosen field.

Today I can speak more-or-less fluently a number of languages, but I’ve never really put them to good use. I never obtained a teaching qualification to teach a language other than English and I never earned a PhD that might have seen me preaching in the amphitheatre of some ugly concrete monolith on campus. I made other choices.

Travel has been both my passion and most likely the reason I’ve never scaled any social or material heights. All, and I mean all my savings have dissipated through air tickets, bus journeys, pad thai noodles, visa fees, shoddy hostels and travel guides. Compared with many, I have had the privilege of visiting spectacular and wondrous people and places, yet I’ve failed to become someone known in any field.

10,000 hours is a number that almost flabbergasts me today. Ten years concentrating on a single field. Gates did it, among others. Maybe estimating the hours I spent hunched in a cubicle  surrounded by bilingual dictionaries, or headphones askew,  sat listening in the language lab and wondering whether I’d ever comprehend what the woman was repeating over and over in a rasping South American Spanish… perhaps I’d calculate a figure that I could subtract from 10,000 to devise a plan to accumulate the outstanding amount?

Gladwell’s Outliers has been the most enlivening but also one of the more sobering reads I’d had in some time. I think I need to put in some long hours.

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First impressions of Dubai

5 March 2010

A light fog shrouds the unfinished construction sites in the DIFC district

I’ve a desire to post my initial impressions and early sensations of Dubai now, since over time my perception of the city will inevitably change. Also, like others, I suffer from making unfortunate generalisations about places and customs, crude stereotypes gleaned from experiences with people. My hope is that, by writing, I’ll think a little more assiduously and carefully about what I’m trying to express, and avoid some notorious pitfalls of reckless cliché and hackneyed phrase.

Dubai is glitzy and stylish

I’m fairly sure that this is an accurate adjective for a city which has burst forth from the desert in a short number of years. From my apartment building situated next door to the architecturally wondrous Dubai International Finance Centre, sleek, svelte office towers rise up along Sheikh Zayed Road, glistening and shimmering in the morning sun.

Dubai interiors are generally exsquisitely designed and it’s clear than for a considerable time no expense has been spared on original fit-outs and exceptional furniture. Can you describe people as glitzy? Yeah, I think I can. On Thursday night, when I sit downstairs in the apartment hotel and chat with security guards over a cigarette, there’s a constant passing parade of both sexes, overdressed, over-coiffed and, applicable to some of them, overstretched. I ‘ve always hated shiny fabric, but here they certainly don’t. They embrace satin suits, gold stilettos and whatever that gunk is that woman slap all over their faces.

Despite the colourful superlatives attached to the city, inhabitants are a little ordinary

In comparision with other cities, a sizeable chunk of the Dubai workforce is busy in the banking & finance centres. These are conservative industries that demand males and females to strip themselves of any personality and wear the obligatory dark-colour suit and appropriately dull accessories. Eating lunch as I often do in the neighbourhood Lebanese restaurant, I sit and watch the view, a neverending sea of dreary-looking charcoals and steel-greys.

The burqa might well be the world’s ugliest garment, but at least it swishes. The streets surrounding the Dubai International Finance Centre are filled with cardboard cutout figures that are interrupted every now and then by the bright blue overalls of unskilled labour from the subcontinent. Seen the movie Brazil? Since landing in Dubai this movie comes into my head at least once a day. The people in my neighbourhood are straight from the office scenes. As are the offices themselves.

Dubai’s architecture is massive and stark

The greatest dissatisfaction in my life is that I won’t live to see the world when it resembles the opening scenes of my two favourite science fiction films, Bladerunner and The Fifth Element. You don’t have to like either of the movies; many of my closest friends don’t. However, they both commence with incredibly inspiring images of what respectively, Los Angeles in 2017 and New York in the 24th century might look like. When Bladerunner was released in 1982, it gave me a passion for the slightly degraded, of things past their prime, of the descent into ruin.

Night falls and the city is already sleeping

That’s how I see Dubai, summed up beautifully by The Index, an 80-storey mixed residential and commercial tower that dominates the view from my living room windows. Topped out but not yet completed, it ground-floor service areas, driveways and footpaths remain far from finished, and in the right light, appear already to be slowly crumbling. A score of similar projects are within my view, towered over by deserted cranes. Each building looks like a wonderful dream that was half imagined but that might yet slide back into the sand, without ever having been occupied.

My impressions will change as I learn more, discover new places and meet people who can introduce my the the varied and various layers of this glitzy desert settlement. for now, I’m happy to stare out from the window by night over a futurescape that takes me back to my teenage dreams.

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