Extraction 5

I ran into an acquaintance at the bank today. She is supposed to be leaving the Kingdom tomorrow on her final exit visa. I suspect that she will have some problems since she does not yet have her final exit visa. She was at the bank to close her local account. She apparently used it like a real bank account; when I asked her why she didn’t just walk away from it since there is no departure clearance requirement that the accounts be closed, she claimed that she had “twenty years of savings” in it. I didn’t bother to ask her why she hadn't taken the money out sooner or even more importantly, why she didn’t invest that money in a more reasonable location where it might, you know, earn some interest. Her house was inspected but the item hasn’t been cleared from her online departure clearance list. She doesn’t have her plane tickets. She requested “cash in lieu” instead of having Aramco pack up her stuff but she said she hadn’t received the money yet. She called Personal Effects about that and was told she needed to fill out another form to complete the “cash in lieu” process, which she claimed she was never told about.

In short, she frittered away most of her 30 days’ notice period, apparently not bothering to meet with Personnel or read their departure guide and research the things that she needed to do before leaving. That guide would have clearly indicated she needed to turn in her iqama to get her final exit visa about 21 days before departure, that the final exit visa wouldn’t be prepared until all items on her online departure clearance list were approved, that taking “cash in lieu” instead of an Aramco-organized shipment required almost as much paperwork, that receiving any of her final payments wouldn’t happen until all of this nonsense was dealt with, and that trying to sort these matters out once she left was nearly impossible (payments can be delayed for months). What sort of person waits until the day before they are to leave to do anything in this country? Despite having lived here for 20 years, she’s apparently quite clueless.

She’s also the architect of her own misery. Aramco doesn’t make it easy to leave, and while it is true that the information that you need to make your departure plans may be spread all over the place, it is available without too much effort. After thinking this over, I wonder if effort isn’t at the heart of this. It takes effort to get a clue. It takes effort to pull yourself from Aramco’s clutches, and quite a bit of effort in the first place to keep from sinking into the muffling cocoon that is the Aramco expat lifestyle, a cocoon comprised of housekeepers, car washers, drivers, and an army of small brown men seeing to all of the dirty labor. I see this disease affecting nearly all old-timers to the point that some of them don’t even leave when they are supposed to but beg and plead for extension after extension. Living in the real world is hard work.