No thanks

Back to Hong Kong tomorrow and this may be my last visit to Dubai. It's not somewhere I would choose for a holiday and the new guy is pretty much up and running in my old job. He's quite OK, pleasant, not stupid, and best of all, he's new. I suspect he has a skeleton or two lurking around, a touch of bipolar or the like, and I don't give a damn. He's in, I'm out and praise be to Allah for that.

All in all it's been a good visit. I've bought some new clothes, eaten very well, met some new people and paddled around the Burj Al Arab.

I've only cried once in the past few weeks and that was yesterday when I received my performance report for last year. The customs officer gave me a low rating, below average; the lowest I've ever had. I didn't go the extra mile or something. I did the job, but I didn't do anything special with it, apparently.

It's not enough these days to meet every deadline, make no errors, answer every stupid question from people who are too lazy to figure it out themselves, travel all over the globe to some less than desirable places (and some very nice ones), help others understand how to do their jobs and do it all quietly and efficiently so that he and his department look good. No, that's not enough.

Now I'm supposed to take a job I can't stand that I've been doing for way too long and make it more dynamic.

I don't believe it for a minute.

It's my punishment for daring to say 'no thanks' when they told me I was moving to Dubai. There's that inability to buckle under thing. Men who should be in uniform really don't like it.