Enter Kamal

Upon every life a little rain must fall, even in Doha, and our personal stormcloud was one Mr. Kamal, "maintenance man" (despite the fact that I never saw nor heard of him actually ever fixing or facilitating the repair of anything). He actually was the gatekeeper for the sheikh who owns, well, our neighborhood. His actual function was to stop any residents from actually hanging or fixing anything in their units, for example changing curtains, having baseboards, which looked like they had been vandalized by some malcontent with wood glue, painted.


He was creative in an obstinate kind of way, though. When we aksed him why we had a three foot tall kitchen cabinet with no shelves, he replied "It's supposed to be that way." When I pointed out that every other cupboard, even ones half that height, had at least one shelf, his rejoinder was "maybe it's the style somewhere." I was a little disappointed he couldn't give me specifics on exactly what culture or country could make use of a kitchen cupboard where one could stack approximately thirty-seven tuna cans on top of one another. When we asked him about our vandalized/recycled-looking baseboards, he just kept repeating "I don't think this is a problem," presumably hoping to rely on his superior mind-control skills to convince us we weren't seeing what we were claiming we saw. When finally cornered, he said "as per company policy, no changes are allowed." At this point Michelle asked if company policy was to have baseboards that looked liked they'd been ripped from a gutted building...


We weren't the only rabblerousers that Kamal was sent in to deal with. Our neighbors Dan and Melissa had a desk delivered to their home one afternoon. Kamal insisted on opening the box and inspecting the contents. I have no idea what he was searching for, but I'm sure the TSA could use people with his persistent and lack of personal skills. Soon thereafter, the "security" gate at the entrance to our compound, which had previously always been up, was sudden lowered so that we had to honk to have Ahmed or Abbas open the gate with a key fob. This was obviously meant to keep out contractors that we had coming to our places to fix the original shoddy finish work, since any teenager with a couple years of karate could have overpowered Ahmed and Abbas and made it into the compound. Actually, several of us had considered ramming through the flimsy gate with rental cars before we bought our own, but didn't feel like paying damages for the car.


So for over a month we had to deal with constant drama regarding any repairs or improvements we wanted done to our villas, and we generally decided we needed to act covertly if anything was to be fixed...