Living and working with 250 English-speaking women colleagues on a gated campus in Saudi Arabia was quite an experience, and to this day makes me question many aspects of ‘the sisterhood’, and a lot else.
The confining conditions – think Mallory Towers meets Alcatraz – sometimes brought out the worst in us all, and the financial stakes (described by one wag as ‘the money addiction’) were high, which added to the stress.
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Nevertheless, the experience was highly entertaining a lot of the time, many colleagues were talented, clever and funny, and some inconsequential story or another was always on the go. Once or twice though, there was an exceptional event involving an exceptional character.
One such was called Morag, and as soon as she arrived, she advertised an already-opened packet of porridge oats on our staff intranet for 50 cents, which was derided as weird and miserly, and much criticised at the time.
Obviously Morag was flat broke and gossip quickly fired up and darted through the university about her supporting some boyfriend or another on a Greek island, plus his mother ( her name was even mentioned in some versions, Sophia ).
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Morag began her contract just when a well-known Saudi bank opened a branch on campus, and they were giving out credit cards to anyone who asked. We all had good salaries and were working for the same university, so it was easy and quick to get a card, with generous credit on it too.
She might have been penniless, but Morag was neither daft nor slow. Within weeks, she managed to get two Visa cards, pocket the substantial credit (rumoured to be around $20,000) and leave the country on the next flight out.
Of course there was a lot of finger-wagging afterwards, but once that was over, Morag’s reputation acquired the secret admiration and sparkle that the crafty fly-by-night often tends to enjoy.
She was last sighted two years later in expensive clothes on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm, sans boyfriend (and sans Sophia).
Out There & In Here 