A typical day in work for me here in my new job.

I work right out in the desert. I was so excited to get an ID badge but actually they never ask for it or look at it because they know me now! Then I drive to our little compound and
the security guy at the gate lets me in. I park around the back and walk to the front
door - I have to sign in and write the time on a piece of paper with all our names on
at around 9am. I go upstairs. Now that's just a little sentence but they are
grand sweeping stairs in a large hallway and the banisters have ironwork pattern
things and everything. I get to my desk say good morning to anyone already there
(though some of them I see in the hotel at breakfast anyway - even my boss stays
there!).

In the mornings I do lots of working with my lines and boxes, flow charts and
all this nice complicated stuff. I review them with the operational advisor. I also have to update some documents, write some guidance documents about how to use the software. I often end up proof reading documents because I'm the native English speaker - even though I have terrible
English but they don't realise that! All external meetings are generally in the
mornings but I don't get involved in those.

Lunch time! We have a buffet provided (for free!) so we queue up and have soup,
salad, bread (3 or 4 types), hot dishes (there is generally rice, 2 kinds of
meat, one kind of pasta, one of vegetables) , fruit, desserts, cans of drink
etc.
The food is really nice! We have a ladies table - since we have recruited some
more ladies we had to steal one of the men's tables to add it to ours! We have
great chats in a mixture of English and Arabic, we have British, Austrian,
Dutch, Lebanese and Emiratis on our table! In fact we might need to steal
another table soon since if everyone is there we don't have enough space
already!


Afternoons - sometimes we have internal meetings, I'm the only woman in the
engineering department which I guess is usual but another one is coming soon. We
have locals, French, German, Polish and Brits in the team so meetings do end up
with conversations in various languages but we try to stick to English because
that's the common language. The team is pretty good - we are all going in the
same direction (which is unusual at this stage of a project!) and everyone is
willing to help everyone out. Often some of the men will arrive back in the
afternoon after spending the mornings doing site surveys - they are visiting
sites all over the UAE. They have these white polystyrene (styrofoam) pieces
which are the same size as the box they will need to put in each vehicle so they
take it with them to try to see where they could fit it rather than take the
real one which is rather heavy!

We finish around 5.30, if the sun has been shining on my car it can get pretty
hot but it has air conditioning so I turn that on for a couple of minutes, by
the time I leave the site it's quite comfortable. The guys on the gate wave as I
leave and another day is done!

The next episode will include tales of my debut with the UAE Philharmonic
Orchestra (in the Atlantis Hotel which is the big one on the
Dubai Palm!)