Two weeks in Dubai

I landed in Dubai on the 29th of November, 1999.

The friend who was supposed to travel with me had pulled out three days before the flight. The visa was in my passport. The ticket was paid for. My father had arranged the funds. I had no Plan B. I went.

We had found, through a chain of family contacts in Multan, a Pakistani family in Dubai who agreed to receive me. The family lived in the Ajman industrial area, which is not actually Dubai. It is a different emirate. The drive from Dubai International Airport to Ajman is over an hour, longer if the traffic is bad. The family’s son, whose name was Saud, was holding a placard with my name written on it at Terminal One when I came out of arrivals. He drove me to his house.

I lived with Saud’s family for almost a month.

I want to put down what that month was like, because the version of me that landed in Dubai is the version most personal-CEO websites edit out. I was twenty-three years old. I had a BCS, two failed first-job stints, and a one-way ticket. I was sleeping on a bed that was not mine, in a country I did not know, in a house full of people I had met for the first time on the day I arrived. I had a finite amount of cash. I had no job.

Every day, I commuted from Ajman to Dubai. The commute was three shared taxis. I would catch the first taxi from the industrial area to the Ajman taxi stand. The second taxi from Ajman to Sharjah. The third taxi from Sharjah to Bur Dubai. The whole journey took two hours each way. Once I was in Dubai, I would walk from office to office on foot, dropping off resumes. I would buy Gulf News and Khaleej Times for the appointment section. I would mark every job that fit my profile. I would call from a public phone. I would walk to the next office.

I want you to imagine that month. The heat. The shared taxis. The walking. The phone booth. The resumes. The walking. The walking.

By the end of the second week, I had my first job.

The job was as a programmer at 1,500 dirhams per month. It was not a lot of money, even for 1999. It was enough to move out of Saud’s house and rent a shared room in Dubai. It was enough to start.

I did the thing I am not proud of next. I did not tell Saud’s family I was leaving. I had been afraid for the entire month that they would, at some point, ask me to share the cost of my stay. I did not have the cash to share it. I had convinced myself that the only way to leave without causing a scene was to leave without telling them. I packed my bag one evening, took a shared taxi to Dubai, and never went back.

I have wanted to apologize to Saud’s family for twenty-five years. I have not figured out how. The apology that is real is the apology that recognizes the shame I caused myself by leaving the way I did. The honor of having been hosted by them was not something I had earned the right to walk out on. They had received me. They had taken me to their house. They had fed me. They had made me feel I was not entirely alone in a city I did not know. The least I owed them was a goodbye.

The reason I am putting this story in is that it is the first piece of evidence in this memoir that I am not the hero of every part of my own life. The boy who flew to Dubai with no Plan B was the same boy who slipped out of his hosts’ house in the middle of the night because he could not face them.

I will give you the rest of the early Dubai story in this chapter, because the next chapter has more in it.

The first job did not last long. I quickly realized 1,500 dirhams was below the market rate for what I could do. I started looking for the next job. I found one at a place called Pioneer House. The man who ran it was Raza Jafri. He offered me 3,000 dirhams. I accepted in principle but had to take a programming test as part of the offer.

I did not have a computer of my own.

So I took the test on the computer at my current job, while I was supposed to be working on the current job’s tasks.

My boss at the first job, who was an Emirati man, walked over to my desk and saw what I was doing. He read the screen. He understood. He fired me on the spot.

He also did something I did not expect. He gave me 500 dirhams as a parting payment. He did not have to. He was not contractually obligated. He had the right to send me out with nothing. Instead he handed me 500 dirhams. He told me I was free to go.

I have remembered that gesture for twenty-five years.

I have thought about it a lot, especially when I am the boss in a similar situation. There is a category of moments in business where you have the legal right to be hard, and the moral right to be hard, and the option to be soft anyway. The 500 dirhams was the boss being soft when he had every right to be hard. He could have ruined a young man who deserved to be ruined. He chose not to.

I try to be that boss when the situation comes up on my side. I do not always succeed. The standard is the 500 dirhams from a man whose name I have lost track of, in a Dubai office in late 1999.

I joined Pioneer House. The Pioneer House years are the next chapter.

The lesson of this chapter, if you are taking notes, is the smallest one.

If you are about to fly to a city you do not know, with no Plan B, you will discover that the city does not know you have no Plan B. The city is full of people who are also there because they had no Plan B. The advantage you have is that you are willing to walk on foot, drop resumes by hand, and ride shared taxis for two hours each way. Most people are not willing to do this for two weeks. Most people last three days and go home.

You only have to last two weeks.

By the end of two weeks the city will have given you the first job. From the first job, the second job is twice as easy. From the second job, the third is four times as easy.

The compounding starts at job one.

You only have to last two weeks.