COWI Dubai

The first day, the office driver picked me up. The following couple days, I took a taxi to work. About the fifth day or so, I got a rental car. The ride to work is about 10-15 km, shouldn’t be too bad at all. The traffic is just about like any major US city. Terrible. The only difference is the ego factor. In Dubai, when someone cuts you off, you are compelled to speed up, cut someone else off in order to pass the original offender, cut them off and slow down to well below the speed limit. This sets off a chain reaction until the entire 12 lane highway is inching along. This happens on a daily basis. Morning commute takes about 30 minutes. There are a limited number of free parking spaces at the office. I always arrive early enough to get one of these.

As I said, the office is brand new. They’ve only moved here two months ago. Only the senior managers have offices. I sit amongst a group of senior engineers in a very open room. Throughout the week, various things continue to arrive, bookshelves, desks, cubicle walls, computers, plants etc…

The overall project is called Al Zorah; it is located about 25 km north of Dubai in the emirate of Ajman, UAE. It is a mixed use development of approximately 20 square kilometers. There will be a number of different housing options from apartments and condos to large waterfront mansions. There is to be a hospital, two schools, high-end retail shopping and more. A creek and canals will line the entire development. I’ll see if I can post the project description.

My primary assignment is to assist with the final design and produce construction drawings and specifications for the concrete block retaining walls that will line the canals in the development. Most major marine engineering companies develop their own in-house software for this type of design. COWI is no exception; they’ve done so through a complicated multi sheet excel workbook. This is the program I promised to discuss more. To use the software, I have to pass through a series of security checks and remote logins to gain remote access to special calculation PCs in Denmark. After defining the geometry of the wall, various soil parameters, a number of load cases including water levels, applied loadings, and susceptibility to earthquakes, a series of macros is begun, and Factors of Safety for a variety of failure methods is produced. It took two days to acquire and create all the permissions necessary for me to access the sheet. Working remotely was especially slow as every key stroke and mouse click is relayed hundreds of miles to Denmark, and then back to Dubai. All-in-all, a real pain.

Lunch is delivered from a fast food Arabic restaurant. I never would have guessed, but Emirati fast-food is even worse than American fast food. Some of the office eats together. I eat with them on occasion but mostly eat by computer and continue waiting for the remote connection to keep up. Afternoon is the same as the morning until about 4:00PM (8AM your time) when everyone from home starts logging on and sending emails. There’s a brief period where I get to catch up on home life before its quitting time.

Getting home through afternoon rush hour is much worse than the morning. It takes an hour to get home, if not more, most of which is spent sitting still, or riding my brakes. Then begins the nightly ritual of feeding myself. The hotel has one restaurant where they advertise a buffet for 139 Dirhams, ~$45. That’s a bit much for a daily dinner. No thanks. Rumor on the street there are places I can find good local food for cheap. I have yet to find any of these places. A couple of really nice expensive restaurants are around. Outside of those, restaurants are predominantly American chains. TGI Fridays, Chiles, Applebees, KFC, McDonalds, and Burger King are all here. Anything else is too far away. I have yet to succumb to fast food, but I have eaten most of my dinners at the American chains.

Dubai is known for its resorts. Most of these resorts are all inclusive. I tried to check out a couple resorts but was discouraged, 1) because I wasn’t staying there and 2) I didn’t have enough money to spend at those kind of places. So be it, there’s plenty else to see.

After dinner, I head back to the hotel, catch up online or try to write some more of this. There are old trashy movies on TV every night, like Die Hard, Alien vs. Predator and all manner of other lousy American cinema.

That’s a typical work day in Dubai. I go through the week with little variation on this scheme. Along again comes Thursday. David, the building engineering director and Pedro invite me to join them at a music club at Hotel Majestic at 9:30. Thus begins the second weekend.