Chapter 23\ My punishment for not holding a driver’s license

I flew to Dubai, where Johnny Theodory, who I had met on the training course, picked me up on arrival around midnight and drove me to the Carlton Hotel on the creek. This was one of the three decent hotels operating in the Dubai of the late Sixties. The Carlton was owned and managed by Sheikh Walid Harmouch, a Lebanese expat from the Chouf mountains. The second, Al Bustan, located next to Dubai airport, was owned, and managed by the Albert Abela Company, while the third was in Bur Dubai and owned and managed by an Indian family. 

Early the next morning, a Land Rover from Shell Markets Middle East Limited – as my host company was called – picked me up and drove me to my first meeting with David Harcourt, the general manager. As I walked into the sunlit room, I was fascinated by the colorful heraldic shields that hung on the walls to help introduce visitors to the general manager’s college, the British Army regiment in which he had served, and his polo club. Behind his desk, a red and yellow Shell flag crossed with the white and red flag of the Emirate of Dubai. I was greeted with a military welcome and an instant enquiry after Ferdie Farwaji, which brought a smile to my host’s face. Then he unfolded a map on the conference table and pointed to the many red shells on the map, explaining that these were the Shell service stations scattered across Dubai and the Northern Emirates. He then turned and handed me the keys to a rented Toyota Cressida, requesting that I call on all these stations during the coming week to find out for myself the service and product knowledge levels that his people possessed, and to then come back and report to him and to my agency team.

His reaction when I told him that I did not drive should have been documented in Shell’s Book of Catastrophes. His face turned green as he interrogated me about the professional ethics behind accepting the role of their regional advertising account director when I had never driven a car, and if Farwaji and the human resources team at Shell Lebanon had investigated the subject of their new candidate’s driving skills during the interview. When he realized that my honesty was not at stake, but that the Shell people were to be blamed, he asked me – using his British sense of patience – to wait in the adjacent room where his personal assistant was seated.

As this incident was in the pre-direct phone dialing days, I instantly noticed that the secretary was in the process of calling a Lebanese phone number through the company operator. After a few minutes, which felt like years, the call came through and was passed on to Harcourt. The deadly silence that had prevailed since I was shown out of his room was suddenly replaced by a very heated exchange that sounded contrary to all I had learned about the cool temper of the British and their politeness. His shrieks and desk-thumping caused the blonde PA to physically show her disturbance, which forced me to keep my eyes on the door, as I expected Harcourt to storm out with a burnished sword.

Then we heard the phone as it was slammed into its cradle and the nervous buzz of the intercom summoning the PA back into her boss’s office. I sat there in silence, expecting the security officers to come running to escort me to the airport. The young lady walked out in a hurry, and I was left alone with all the disturbing thoughts pouring into my mind.   

After what felt like an hour, she came back, accompanied by a uniformed janitor carrying a military looking sack that was too heavy for her to transport on her own. When the sack was delivered to the GM’s office, I was called back inside to see a pile of blue overalls, t-shirts, socks, and desert boots, all the same color, piled on his conference table. He handed me the clothes to stuff back into the sack, along with a typed program listing the names of Shell stations around the Northern Emirates and a date next to each. Then, in a voice that seemed to be a serious attempt at controlling his furious temper, he told me that, since I was unable to drive, I had to put on the overalls and report to a new station every morning where I was to join the forecourt team in serving motorists, filling their cars with gasoline, wiping their wind-shields, testing the pressure of their tires, topping the water in their radiators and accepting the tips I might be offered with a smile and a word of thanks. At the end of this assignment, I was to come back and report on how Shell’s service in the Northern Emirates could be improved.

This turned out to be a real eye-opening experience, as HIMA was retained to make Shell the top-of-mind brand amongst motorists in the highly competitive environment that existed in the late Sixties. Knowing the way car owners thought and behaved was a must. The people of the Trucial States (as the emirates were collectively known prior to unification in 1971) were a mosaic of ethnic groups, nationalities, education, and socio-economic standing, who behaved differently and spoke with different tongues. However, for the sake of communication, the majority used English, followed by Urdu. Arabic speakers were the minority.

The local population included many nationalized Iranians. They had Yemenis, too, particularly those who were members of the Trucial Oman Scouts. Large numbers of UAE nationals could speak Urdu in addition to their native Gulf Arabic. Most of the population were Indians and Pakistanis, as the country was in the process of being developed and needed blue collar workers. Then there were Palestinians and Lebanese, who were either running construction businesses or employed by the private sector. Egyptians were mostly government employees and teachers, while the British and Americans were mostly employed by multinational companies.

Each one of these nationality groups looked after their cars in a totally different way. For most Asians and the northern Arabs, the cars they were driving were the very first cars they had owned. In contrast, it was rumored that a rich national who had driven home with a brand-new red car, only to discover that the red color was not liked by the other members of his family, parked the red car in his garage and went and bought the same model car in blue. The requirements of motorists belonging to each of these groups when they drove into a Shell service station was therefore totally different.

Working at Shell service stations in Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Quwain, Fujairah and Ras Al Khaimah introduced me to the difference that existed between the emirates. Dubai was a trading city that was starting to develop as a regional base for British companies like Shell, Cable & Wireless, Unilever, Rover, and BOAC. Sharjah, which was quickly following in Dubai’s footsteps, was the residential base for many Lebanese, Palestinians, Egyptians, and Jordanians who were working in Dubai. Sharjah offered a more affordable cost of living and an abundance of restaurants, bars, entertainment outlets and beaches. Ajman and Umm Al Quwain were still sleepy fishing coves. Fujairah was a trading port on the Indian Ocean and Ras Al Khaimah was famous for its Abela Hotel and its gambling casino.

Working on the forecourts of the Shell service stations in the UAE taught me that to be successful in the advertising business, I had to always try to be as close to the product or service I was entrusted to promote as possible. Sitting in an ivory tower in Ras Beirut was not ideal.