But Is It Necessary?

A couple of weeks ago, my shopping buddy MG emailed to see if I wanted to go to Bahrain that weekend. I said sure. I didn’t really need anything except some bacon but an outing sounded like a fine idea. The next day, my dog friend PM emailed to see if I wanted to go to Bahrain with her and a friend that weekend. I said, sounds great, perhaps we can all go together! Our respective errands weren’t that different.

PM wasn’t sure that her friend’s car would hold four people plus all the stuff she planned to buy in Bahrain. I said, well, that’s not a problem, we can take my car, plenty of room for all.

No, that wouldn’t work, she told me. She had heard that I had to have a letter from Saudi Government Affairs in order to let someone drive my car. It wasn’t an issue of my being a woman but more an issue that the driver wasn’t the same person that the car was registered to. This didn’t make any sense since lots of Saudis have drivers that drive their (the Saudis’) cars. But the Magic Kingdom is also the logic-free zone. It was entirely possible that she was right. Of course, there had been no official announcement of such a policy change but around here that means nothing. Rules are changed arbitrarily and often with little to no announcement. I had heard nothing about this from my other "rumor" sources. But still, there was definitely a non-zero chance that this was a new rule that we had to navigate.

So I hied off to Al Midra, a new Aramco office building which contains HR, Personnel, Payroll, and Government Affairs. This was not a casual errand because Al Midra is located on the far western edge of Dhahran and is accessed only by an amazingly convoluted set of roads. Getting there is just the first step. You then must find a parking place that is hopefully within half a mile of the building. The parking lots are designed in a most fiendish way with hidden entrances, curbs that block lateral access from one part of a lot to another, and a general lack of signage. It can take more than half an hour to drive three miles, park, and walk to the building.

The main room for the HR services is a large bullpen ringed with counters. It often isn’t clear which counter you need to get to; even if you can clearly state your business, there is nobody to ask for advice. Sometimes there is a machine dispensing numbered paper tickets, sometimes there isn’t, and sometimes the counter you need to get to isn’t using those particular tickets but some other utterly impenetrable system to determine who is next. Queuing would be far too easy and logical.

I made my way to the right counter only to confront a fully veiled Saudi woman who spoke about two words of English, despite the fact that the official language of Aramco is English. I hate dealing with Saudi women who work in these types of jobs because they rarely know the rules or have the information you need, and they always, always, 100% of the time, have to ask their male supervisor what to do. Why not put him at the fucking desk and be done with it?

After a stumbling exchange, she said that such a letter could be produced. I would need a copy of the iqama, driver’s license, Aramco ID, and passport page of the driver, and a copy of my iqama, istmarrah, Aramco ID, and car insurance card. (The iqama is the residence permit and the istmarrah is the car registration.) She said that she could perhaps have the letter done by Wednesday (in time for our planned weekend trip on Thursday) if I could get these items to her by Tuesday morning. It was clear that she was not writing the letter herself but simply passing all this stuff on to her supervisor.

I also tried to get her to clarify whether such a letter was actually necessary. She just looked at me. I repeated my question: is the letter necessary? She continued to look at me, tilted her head a bit, and said, nec…e…ssary? Hmm, clearly I wasn’t going to get anywhere with this one.

Back in my office, I called PM who called her friend who gathered all of his stuff, scanned it, and emailed it to me. I made a copy of all my items then made the tortuous return journey to Al Midra the next morning. I passed the scans over to the woman who passed them to her supervisor standing right behind her. He looked them over then said that it would not be possible to make such a letter. He then said, it wasn’t necessary to have such a letter within the Kingdom, that my friend could drive my car anywhere in Saudi. I was rather stunned (why in hell didn’t that stupid woman tell me this the day before) but I asked him, okay, did I have to be in the car with my friend? He did that weird Arab/Asian thing where he moved his head in a way that was neither yes nor no. I then said, well, what about Bahrain? Can he drive my car in Bahrain? He said that he didn’t know about that (which was probably the truest thing either of those two had told me so far).

I called PM and told her this tale of woe, then said, I think we should go for it, be adventurous, and take my car anyway. She was convinced that we had to have a letter and said that she wasn’t going to risk it, that she and her friend would go in his car. I called MG and said, you and I are going to go in my new(ish), spacious, comfortable car. Come by at 7:30 on Thursday.

Crossing the causeway into Bahrain is a fairly convoluted affair (you should not be surprised). There are five chokepoints in each direction at which you are required to stop and hand over money or passport, or take a slip of paper to hand off to another booth down the line. This sounds far more organized than it actually is.

At some of these chokepoints there may only be 4 out of 20 booths open. Twenty lines of cars, most of which are driven by Saudis, mind you, are gunning to get into whichever line they think is moving. They do not hesitate to try and cross all twenty lanes to get from one side to the other. Booths can randomly open and close for prayer breaks, tea breaks, smoke breaks, shift changes (which are not predictable; if you complain about the wait, invariably you are told that it is due to a shift change), breaks to kiss their friends (Saudi men do a lot of kissing) and there is always a mad crush of cars trying to zoom into a newly opened lane. If this wasn’t frustrating enough, as you move from chokepoint to chokepoint, the booths that are open are randomly positioned. At the first stop, two on the far left and two in the middle might be open. At the next one, three on the far right might be open. Therefore your path through this mess is highly nonlinear. You might be thinking to yourself, why don’t they simply open more booths during easily predicted times of peak traffic? That would be far too logical and imply that the Saudi government had an attitude of “customer service.” (Ostensibly, the Bahraini government runs its side of the causeway but since the ruling family is a puppet propped up by the Saudis, we really only need to blame the Saudis.)

One of the chokepoints is literally designed to be a chokepoint. Twenty lanes go down to one. There isn’t even a guy in the booth. The only purpose is to restrict traffic. The entire causeway can be shut down at this point. They in fact did this several times during the disturbances in Bahrain of this year and last.

The second chokepoint is the one that PM was worried about. At this checkpoint, cameras read your license plate and a machine inside the booth prints a slip of paper with the car registration info on it. The guy in the booth hands it over to you and down the line you hand it to the guy in the booth at chokepoint five. PM predicted that MG and I would not get through the second chokepoint. She called me several times that morning and ended up saying, well, if you get through, I’ll buy you a glass of wine at Trader Vic’s! MG piped up and said, she has to buy me one too because I’m the driver!

To be honest, I was a bit worried too. Technically you are still on the Saudi side of the causeway at chokepoint two (you don’t cross into Bahrain officially until the last chokepoint) and if the guy at Government Affairs in Al Midra was right (that’s the weak link in the chain, isn’t it) then MG should be able to drive my car without any special letter or permission at least up to Bahrain; what happened then was anybody’s guess. But rules do change without any warning and PM knows her way around since she’s been here for almost 20 years.

I had my phone up to my ear as soon as the guy in the booth handed us a slip of paper with my istmarrah number and my name printed on it. PM, I said, we’ll see you at Trader Vic’s! Have the wine chilled and waiting!