Dubai

One thing that only a couple of people know about and that’s only because I have been too busy with work at the moment to hold a conversation with anyone other than via email is that I applied last week for a job on the spur of the moment in Dubai (of United Arab Emirates fame).

The job advert got emailed to me by a work professional association I belong to in a general mail out and I thought “why not”? Talked to Niki and considered it from a family perspective very loosely and I guess on the basis of being intrigued as to how big a “Big US$ tax free salary” was, I shot off my CV without much thought.

The only reason I bring it up today is that I got the “Dear Clayton” letter saying that they thanked me for my application, but I was unsuccessful.

Which is fair enough, it was no skin off my nose but it did bring a bit of a strange dynamic to my life this week.  Once the CV was sent, we (Niki & I) were both in the dark as to how friendly or unfriendly the UAE is and as a mother to two young girls, Niki was a bit worried – and rightly so.

I shot off the CV quickly because the deadline between me receiving the advert and the deadline was only 48hrs but once done we started to openly and for me, internally, ask a lot of “What if” questions.

Starting from “What if I got the job?” down, a lot of thought went into it on both our parts and whilst we never openly sat down and said “we’ll do this, this and that” it was never too far from my mind.  I guess if they wanted to interview me, it would become a lot more serious a discussion, but because it was one little emailed word document sent to the other side of the world it had a bit of a surreal feel to it.

Also because work was really busy, I hadn’t had a lot of time to chat to people other than a “guess what I did email” to my mates which resulted in a few jokes (e.g: “think of the money you’d save on clothes for Niki and the girls – how many burhkers (sp?) does one woman need?” ) and also I shot off an email to a mate of mine who is a Palestinian living in Australia who has a Jordanian wife and has property believe it or not in Baghdad.  His reply (in jest) was along the lines that I had better be prepared to stave off large amounts of Arab sheikhs wanting to give me good quality camels for Niki.

So it was all jokes and laughs and now that’s all it is because I got the reject email last night… and to be honest it’s a bit of a relief.

Listening:  The last of the massive Cure CD… has lasted me a good week and a half.  Which this morning does include the track “Killing An Arab” – how coincidental!