Monthly Archives: June 2007

Mixing Banned at Saudi Banks

Few weeks ago I was talking with a friend of mine who works in the HQ of the Saudi Hollandi Bank when he told me that squads of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice have been raiding his workplace lately. He said the commission were not happy about the mixed work environment there and demanded that the bank segregate men from women. At that time I thought the bank would ignore the commission’s calls because a) it is none of their business, and b) banks HQ’s have been mixed work places for years.

What do I know? Not a very long time after that incident, we read that an “unwritten” order to ban mixing of men and women was given to all banks. The order also demanded banks to allocate separate gates and elevators for women only. None of the local papers here reports the news, and AlArabiya.net which broke the story first do not mention who issued the order. So, as you can see, here we have an order that is unwritten and unattributed, and SAMA, which regulate banking in the country, is declining to comment. Female bank employees said the decision would negatively affect their careers.

I’m not shocked, that’s for sure, I have seen enough lunacy taking place in this land, but I got some questions: How on earth the banks are willing to comply to some unwritten order? How those affected by this can object to it? Why this applies to banks and other private sector businesses but not to Saudi Aramco, which is supposedly owned by the government? Can NSHR say and/or do something about this?

So much for promoting gender equality and empowering women…

Migration

For a very long time, many friends and fellow bloggers have been asking me to move to WordPress and leave Blogger behind. I finally did. Truth be told, I wasn’t planning to move. I was comfortable with Blogger that I even moved my blog from their blog*spot domain to my own. What I hated about Blogger is the weak support. If you have a problem with your blog there was no way in hell you could contact anyone working on the tool that introduced blogging to the masses. But other than that, I liked the service.

Early in June, while I was getting ready for final exams, I was going through one the very well-known symptoms of finalitis: you get creative in stuff that have nothing to do with your studies. For some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to try Google Apps in order to get a customized email address (as in xxx @ saudijeans.org). I mean: why not? It’s free, it seems easy-to-use, and it’s Google . It was only a matter of a few minutes and viola! my new email address was working. I go to check on my blog, but I can’t find it. All I had was a custom 404 Error page. I panicked. I calmed down. I tried to fix it, but couldn’t. I contacted the Google guys but received no answer. I decided to move my blog. If they don’t care enough to fix something that they messed up, then maybe I’m better off without them (blogging-wise, of course, because I almost like every other Google service).

I moved the blog from Blogger to WordPress. However, I’m not using WP.org that many people are using. I’m using a paid version of WP.com. I pay $25 per year to use domain mapping and edit CSS. I know I would have more control over the blog if I used WP.org, but I really didn’t want to bother with hosting and all that stuff, and with that price tag it seemed like a very good deal to me. Moreover, WP.com is optimized to work seamlessly with Google Apps, so I get to have best of both worlds.

Oh and yeah, I’m back!