Job Discussion Forums

[Grendal]

Yes this is another topic beaten to death here, but I would like to resurrect it again for the sheer joy of comments generated about it.

First of all, driving here starts at a very young age some even start in their pre-teens. This of course leads to bad habits acquired at an early age that never get rectified. Not to mention the GOD factor that they are all instilled with. Inshallah I will make it to work this morning, but if I die while drifting and take out a family of five along with me, then it was GOD's will it so happened. (Idiot)

This should suffice to start off the thread.

Grendal

[scot47]

Foreigners are not permitted to own pick-ups.

[EnglishDoYouSpeakIt]

http://i.imgur.com/xZPyc.jpeg

My students tell me that they don't wear seatbelts because Saudi's are the best drivers in the world. The accidents are mostly caused by foreigners. This is ridiculous. The worst part is seeing the toddlers climbing all over the place in the car. You would think after so many child deaths they would figure out that car seats save lives. Even seatbelts increase your odds by 50%.

Scot, I have never heard that rule about trucks, is that something you heard recently or back in the day?

[EnglishDoYouSpeakIt]

double post, sorry.

[scot47]

Pick-ups cannot be owned by foreigners. They are considered as "commercial vehicles".

[jaffa]

The brain-dead, selfish arrogance of the driving really annoys me and is the reason I don't drive here because I'd be fighting every day and end up in jail.

But every now and then the boss lends me his company car to run bureaucratic errands and a few weeks ago I was soon in an altercation with a teenage f###wit who came straight out of a side road onto a busy street - a local custom along with never signalling (I put the lack indication down to, either, they don't understand how to do it, or, can't be bothered. Probably a bit of both.)

So I gave the driver some verbal and he followed, honking his horn and flashing his lights. When we got to a red signal he cut in front of me and started hysterically screaming "F### you!" over and over and giving me the bird. Laughable really but I pointed to a big parking space and told him to stop there and we'd talk about it. Needless to say he didn't stop but, if he had, I would have happily beaten the crap out of him.

Don't even get me started on that blaming every mistake on God business.

[scot47]

For most of my time in KSA I refused to drive. I minimised my time on the raods. Latterly, at KFUPM I noticed more and more colleagues would redfuse to go off-campus because of the horrors of driving. Some went for their weekly supermarket shop early on a Friday when the local crazies are all in bed.

I too heard the stories about "All traffic accidents are caused by Hindis". And "Seat belt not good."

[Grendal]

It was raining in riyadh today (city not capitalized I know) and all the drivers are rushing to get to where they are going because of the water build-up after a rainfall. City planning didn't take into account run off water from rain and just built roads like it was the Oklahoma land rush or something. They get those tanker trucks that carry poo poo to suck up water in really bad areas that the water's reached 30 or 40 cm.

I don't know if they're pumping the water out or releasing the poo poo into the water, but it doesn't seem to be working. Not a good solution that's for sure. While we're on the subject of poo poo. The septic tanks during rain storms seem to fill up with rain water causing an overflow onto the streets too. This may also explain the rush to get to where they are going. All the same, this country is an example of what money does to ignorant people. they just become rich ignorant people.

Grendal

[scot47]

When we lived in Khaledeya in Jeddah (Saudi Arabian Airlines Compound) our 5-year-old asked "Why do the Arabs fill their streets with water ?" I never did come up with a sensible answer.

I know that when we left that city in 2002 the Municpality had still not come up with sensible sewers and drains.

[trapezius]

Drove to all corners of Jeddah for 3 hours today running various errands, covering 78 km. A good 30-45 minutes or more of that 3 hours was spent at traffic lights, and another 30-45 minutes in bumper to bumper traffic going at 5 km/h due to all the road works going on.

I didn't go anywhere new, and I didn't see anything new, but as it is the longest I have spent driving in a day within a city, all the bits of stupidity and non-sense I see daily, I saw all of it within a few hours and it left me bewildered.

The design of the road network is so stupid and inefficient, not to mention severely inadequate, it is laughably frustrating. And then all the uncivilized (and illegal/criminal) behaviors that drivers exhibit, I saw examples of all types in one day. It is sad really. Funny thing is, most drivers exhibit such behaviors, young, old, rich, poor, local, foreign.

Got home and passed out from the exhaustion and the sun, and woke up 3 hours later with a massive headache, which is still not going away.

What probably bothered me the most was all the rubbish everywhere, on the sides of streets, in empty lots of land, in parking lots. Even my 4 year old commented disapprovingly of the rubbish in one of the parking lots that I parked in today.

And when you juxtapose all that (shitty road system, shitty road conditions, shitty drivers, filth everywhere in public, etc) with the 10 or so luxury hotel and apartment skyscrapers (proper 40-80 storey skyscrapers) that are going to pop up along the Jeddah Corniche in the next few years, it just doesn't make sense at all. Comically sad, really.

And worst of all, nothing will change, as far as the culture is concerned, not at least for several decades, maybe a couple of centuries.

[jaffa]

Incredible that pretty much all Saudis do in terms of entertainment is drive around all day ... and they still can't do it properly! How does saudiisation ever expect to produce competent staff? A German engineer who had to suffer an annual, enforced influx of engineering graduates told me that he wouldn't trust them to change a wheel on a car.

[scot47]

You can do an Engineering Degree without knowing what a spanner is for ! In fact most saudfis who graduate in Engineering get a desk job. Interesting that "Engineer" (Mohandes) is a title considred as a great honorific.

Would you drive over a bridge designed and built by a local engineer ?

[al-Californian]

[scot47]

I am right about EVERYTHING !

"Oh Lord it is hard to be humble...................."...

[cmp45]