Sometime in January I remember going through an intersection and the traffic camera flash went off. I didn’t think I caused it so I didn’t bother to do anything about it. One must monitor these things b/c if traffic violations are not settled within a year, one can be denied access to an outbound flight at the airport without notice until the infraction is settled. I logged into the Ministry of the Interior web site with my Resident Permit # and discovered I had 7 points and a fine logged against my ID for about USD 1650. I have no idea what I did but knew I had to get it off my record.
So I called the fixer I used when I obtained my driver’s license and gave him my plate #. He called me the next day and told me that I had run a red light at a specific roundabout. He asked if I had been pulled over and issued a citation as the nature of the offense indicated that this should have happened and it didn’t. He told me that the police officer that issued the ticket was the former bodyguard of the Sheikh that runs the Traffic Dept, whom I met briefly when I obtained my license 18 months ago. I was told to turn up before 7am at the Traffic Dept and we would try to get it waived.
I have a new colleague from Lebanon. She goes through a lot of bureaucratic and administrative hell to obtain entry visas to other countries and to just get official stuff done due to the fact that she hails from a country without a government. She needed to obtain her license and was trying to get driving school waived and came along with me to face our respective driving fates.
I pulled up to the office at 6:30 when we planned to meet so as to go together. I watched the bus unload the tea ladies for another day of service in the office. It was surreal to watch them all enter the building wearing exactly the same thing – black trousers, white long-sleeved shirts and black vest – typical service penguin uniform. They were all petite in height and in varying degrees of body type. But they all had long hair and most of them were still putting the finishing touches on their hair look for the day and fiddling with their mobile phones as they entered the revolving glass door one at a time. Having to deal with my ambiguous albeit expensive traffic violation at 7am with the Sheikh did not seem too onerous given juxtaposed with the fate of these dozens of ladies.
My colleague showed up and we made our way to the Traffic Dept. We were shown into a ground floor office while others waited in the hot sun to be admitted to the same room. I wasn’t sufficiently caffeinated but remembered the Sheikh being on the 2nd floor last time and now we were in a large room with chairs lined along the perimeter of the room as if we were in a majlis. In the center was a small desk with men hovering around a seated man at a desk. I went up to the desk and the seated man knew who I was before I said anything. I was stunned but relieved that in the spectrum of predicaments one might face in these situations, I didn’t have to say anything to get the wheels of infraction elimination moving. The seated man had a nice smile and was very friendly as he confirmed that I was there about a moving violation without my saying anything and he told me to sit down in one of the big chairs for 15 minutes. I asked him if the Sheikh was around and he smiled bigger and said he was the Sheikh, much to my horror. I told him that his new office was a nice improvement over the little one upstairs and thanked him for his kind attention.
He signed my colleague’s license application but she was still stuck going to the same driving school I went to as a formality. He gave some instructions to another man, who ten minutes later handed me a slip of paper with my record that had the moving violation removed but a parking ticket to settle. It was not an inexpensive day once I took care of that and renewed my car’s registration. I went to the office after dropping my colleague off at what seemed a much more crowded driving school than I remembered. I was in the office before 8am and had moved bureaucratic mountains with a phone call and a smile...would that the rest of my existence could be a comparable cakewalk.
My colleague had quite a tale to tell once our preferred taxi driver picked her up from driving school and brought her to the office. The driving school was chaotic. She didn’t know the traffic signs for the verbal test but it didn’t matter. She got in the car and did a quick run around the parking lot and got in a third line requiring payment in the sequence of “completing local driving education” and neither her credit or her debit card would work despite more than sufficient funds available. She had paid cash for the other two payments but now this last one was bigger and the system wasn’t connecting to her bank account and without paying, she’d have to come back. The line was getting longer behind her and there was no ATM on the premises to bypass the machines. A Lebanese man within her proximity also trying to obtain his license saw what was going on and he paid her last bill. She was relieved to have a savior in that moment and took his card to make arrangements later to reimburse him. She came to the office flustered but overwhelmingly relieved.
The next day, my colleague brought a nice box of chocolates and called our taxi driver to ask him to deliver it and the cash to the Lebanese savior at the driving school. Since he was going in the direction of the dry cleaner, she also gave him her claim ticket. I overheard the instructions and reached for my dry cleaning claim tickets. He was gone for an hour and called me when he was at the office door with two armfuls of my dry cleaning, one item for my colleague and a BIGGER box of chocolate from the same confectioner for her from Mr. Driving School Savior. We could not stop laughing.
Posts
