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Episodes from Egypt: What goes on Inside

The buildings in Cairo are almost all the same height, which is maybe five to ten floors. They tend to be oversized, allowing plenty of air inside so that there's something to breathe even in extreme heat. The colonial European part of Cairo was built on the model of Paris. The quarters are cramped, but the arches are big enough for the fully spread wings of gargoyles. From the hotel rooftop at Giza I witnessed a sea of concrete from horizon to horizon, dimly lit in the busy Cairo night, honking and buzzing. The lights that shine over the hotel sign may as well be underwater. The debris and smoke are illuminated as they pass underneath and up into the air. It's Paris, but an abandoned Paris. A Paris that was hit by a bomb, or at least it hasn't been maintained in years.
   Once I saw a small sign on the side of a Cairo building saying something about passport photos. I thought it might be a good idea to look inside. I turned the worn knob of the chipped and uneven door. The tenebrous inside was interrupted by only a small light that illuminated a great spiralling staircase. When it was new, the building was stylish, but the people who built and witnessed that style are probably long since gone. Today the building is cracked, worn and drab. Not discouraged, as this certainly wasn't unexpected, I walked up and looked for the number that was advertised. Unfortunately, most rooms weren't labelled, and all signs were in Arabic. The building was strangely quiet, with only some indication that human life existed there. Some tortured soul passed along the staircase without paying attention to me and there was an old woman who apparently lived on a bench in the hallway. She paid no attention to me either. I gave up and left.
   It was on a street lined with big dark mysterious buildings like the passport building that I once noticed the odd blue glow of an Egyptian barber shop. Hoping for a low price I went inside. You can learn a lot about a country from its barber shops. Go to one in Canada and you'll find a handful of barbers busily cutting people's hair. After they finish they sweep up, and usually they also function as cashiers, manicurists and hair washers. Quality varies, but it's easy to find someone who'll do a decent job. Go to a Polish barber shop and you'll find more or less the same thing, except that it won't be nearly as busy and the haircut will cost one fifth as much. However, if you go to an Egyptian barber shop you'll see something rather different. In this shop a single man did the cutting, sweeping, nose trimming and shaving, but he wasn't there alone. There was second a man behind the cash register, and a third and a fourth man, neither of whom had any ostensible function. The hair cutter was the only man who did any work except for the cashier. He was skilful and quick, as he needed to keep pace with the arriving customers. He did a decent job, and when he shaved my face he dipped his blade into alcohol and set it aflame the way it used to be done in the West before people started worrying about fire safety. The cashier had a bit of a laugh at me for agreeing to a price of 30 pounds, which is very high. All in all I was happy.
Little did I know how much the image of that barber would haunt me. Here was the one man out of that group for whom it would be most advantageous to leave the country and settle in a land that would merit his worth. Those others were happy enough with their status as either owners of the means of production or mysterious food-eating paperweights. Unlike him, they were the sort that gladly stays in Egypt and is therefore common there. After all, if you liked your job, liked where you were, and if you liked being surrounded by friends, why leave?
   That same rhetorical question could be asked of the employees at my place of work in Egypt, but before I get to that I should explain what I was doing there in the first place. It is not usually the practice of a software company to send an engineer on site to a customer, especially not if the company is in Ireland and the customer in Egypt. Their reason was a kind of frugality that turned out to be misguided. My company dealt with a very large intermediary company that sold our Egyptian customer products along with ours. The intermediary had offices in all countries concerned, but their local branches weren't interested in helping us or lending us equipment because they viewed themselves as our competition. Since our financial department wouldn't pay the €30000 necessary to buy the equipment, they needed to send me over to our Egyptian customer, an Egyptian bank, who'd already purchased it.
   So far so good, but there were a few problems in the works. I was instructed to perform testing of the software I'd written and fix any immediately remediable problems. A whole sequence of people at my company had done what psychologists would call "groupthink". They groupthought that the module I'd written was easily testable and fixable, and not a substantial, complicated, and virtually untested product that was dependent upon many unreliable outside components. The groupthinkers concluded that the whole operation would be a cakewalk, and that they could not only promise I'd finish testing and fixing, but also leave the bank with a product. The other problem was that whoever had told the bank and the intermediary company about our plans neglected to mention anything about needing to test and fix, and mentioned only the leaving a product part. That part was eagerly awaited, as my company had actually promised to deliver this product about a year before I started developing it, and that had been a year before my trip to our customer. Needless to say the bank was eager to get things done, and to give me additional incentive they told me their competition had already received our product. I was, of course, unable to reveal the falsity of that claim because I had to keep both my identity of being the author of the product and my true intentions there a secret.
   The secret agendas did not end there. My company had never drawn out detailed plans that specified exactly what the product should do, so the bank decided that they would simply wait for us to implement something and then they would argue with us saying it wasn't what we agreed on. At that point, I would change something for them, and they would again give their opinions. This cycle would continue until they got exactly what they wanted. It's as if someone hired an architect to build a building and then complained about the design and demanded a new one after the building had already been built. It would be fine, except this particular architect found living in Egypt to be as pleasant as living in a vacuum cleaner, and was quite impatient with the whole project to say the least.
   If all this wasn't contemptible and complicated enough, the bank -- our customer -- was by all accounts a bit special amongst all of our customers, though I would not find out just how much until after my dealings with them were finished. I worked with the bank for two business trips, each lasting a little more than a month, and it was during the second trip that some kind of great scandal had erupted. I was summoned to the manager's office and immediately required to explain how it was possible that people were withdrawing large sums of cash using the same bank card at very different locations. Not only were there many such withdrawals, but there were many irate customers who insisted that money was mysteriously vanishing from their accounts. I was asked if someone had cracked the RSA scheme, intercepted messages within the bank's computer and then copied the bank cards and was using them abroad. As it turned out, they were right about the last two things, and whoever it was had done it to many cards indeed. Thousands of people lost anywhere from a few thousand to all of their savings, depending on how frequent the withdrawals were and how early the fraud was detected. Along with my co-worker I was dragged through meeting after meeting with high-ranking bank managers and members of our intermediary company. What had happened? What was the cause of this massive scheme? Our terrible software? It turned out that it was one of their employees. (These things are nearly always an inside job.) This person, who'd been producing their bank cards, had actually been storing the card information in an intermediate file and then using that file to produce the cards, thereby defeating the purpose of the PIN security feature. After a few months, he or she used all the stored card data in this file to produce copies of those cards and then went abroad with some friends to three different countries where the money could be withdrawn.
   Improper card production was just the start of this bank's security demerits. After more than a month of working for them I found out that they had given me a copy of their master encryption key for testing purposes, as they hadn't bothered to make a test version. This key, which is stored on a card, is one of the most important pieces of security information at the entire bank, as there is only one for their entire system. I took it home every day. In fact, for all I knew I could have attempted to open my hotel door with it a few times.
Then there was their laboratory, which was isolated from the rest of the floor by an automatic glass door that everyone slid open by applying friction to it because it was broken. I became especially dexterous at this sliding action because I wanted to minimize my travel time between the computers and the laboratory, as well as because it was on the way to the washrooms, which I needed to relieve my nearly constant painful incontinence. Then there were the security guards, a burly workday one with a bulging revolver in his pocket, and a mangy one, who appeared in the weekend mornings and left his jacket and radio to protect the bank's assets while he went off for the day and did something else. The bank also scanned the incoming personnel and luggage going into the building, but only on weekdays, as a careful cost-benefit analysis by any sensible terrorist would be enough to deter inherently low-casualty weekend attacks.
   How could such an important institution have such lapses in judgment? Well, some degree of explanation would be provided by what went on in the building day after day. Egypt, you see, is the land of fun. Imagine a country with no rules, where you could go out on the street and, like Peter Pan, drive however you wanted, and where you could go to work and play however you wanted. Makers of Microsoft video games like solitaire, if you are reading this you will be glad to know that your code is being run by the very fastest computers on the market, and that it's being run very frequently. While peasants starve to death in the Egyptian streets and die of preventable diseases, you will be glad to know that your solitaire game has been stress-tested to a degree beyond which any further tests could only expose the full intractability of the problem of interface quality assurance. On any given day the desks of our wonderful customer are bubbling with tea, cookies, smokes, conversation amongst friends, and video games. In fact, the games are the only thing more common than the hugs, which are a natural behaviour among so many good friends who just happened to all work for the same company.
   The department with which I worked had a very special manager, a woman who just happened to be the wife of one of the top executives in the company. For my purposes in this blog I'll call her Madame Hitler. The hugging and game playing was frequently interrupted by one of Madame Hitler's frequent talks, during which she became quite irate and vociferous. My co-worker, who was one of my company's employees from our Indian office, was rather fond of recording Madame Hitler's speeches on his laptop, as they could clearly be heard through the wall of our office. It must be the honking, bustling Cairo lifestyle that persuades so many Egyptians to constantly raise their voices, a thoughtful gesture just in case the listening party has gone deaf or is hiding from the speaker in a bunker somewhere. Madame Hitler's subordinates usually emerged from her office in a flushed and unhappy state, no doubt energized and motivated to give Solitaire another test.
   Madame Hitler also liked to occasionally interrupt me and ask me for an update on what was happening with my project. I found this understandable as she was the main representative of our customer. The annoying part was that she wasn't the only one demanding updates. My company tried to co-ordinate the project from Ireland, and also from several middle-Eastern offices simultaneously. To add to the problem, our intermediary partner company also wanted to co-ordinate the project. In fact, they wanted to co-ordinate it so intensely that it would ultimately lead to a long-term failure for my company. Why is that? Why cause their partners to fail? It makes perfect sense when considering that our partners were actually our competitors, and they did a rather bad job of keeping this fact a secret from me. Nothing would have delighted them more than seeing my company fail and the bank use their products instead. Unfortunately for them, Madame Hitler hated and distrusted them even more than she did my company. She did, of course, insist in a characteristically vociferous fashion that they look as if they were doing something, and their way of doing that was to then subsequently insist that I do something. In fact, that insistence came from their upper manager, and from the teenage manager he had working underneath him who had been hired to periodically visit me and do some insisting.
   I am a very patient man, but all this was becoming exceedingly complicated. Our very insistent and completely useless intermediary company was now pretending work hard on implementing a project that was secretly still under development. I had been given the task of fixing a hundred thousand lines of C++ and some five managers to report to from three different companies, many of whom were keeping secrets from each other. Five managers is approximately four too many, and eventually secrets get uncovered. When the entire staff of the intermediary company showed up at our customer's office so they could somehow shift the blame for the bank's fraud scandal stupidity on someone other than them, they expected me to be grateful. It was at that time that the upper manager at our intermediary company thought it appropriate to express his objections to me doing development at a customer's site. Annoyed, I told him to speak to my manager about it. In fact, I told him this quite loudly and repeatedly to his face, until he finally fucked off and left me alone, indignant at my effrontery. Not only was I ungrateful for his eager response to the fraud crisis, but I also displayed the attitude that people who weren't actually doing any work on my project ought to stay out of it. Furthermore, I was completely ungrateful for the discounted hotel rates that we obtained through the intermediary company, and maybe I didn't like the embarrassing act of pantomiming an aristocrat to the hotel goons who pushed my elevator buttons for me and pretended to be useful. My action was inexplicable and wholly un-Egyptian. It was the equivalent of the hair cutter throwing the cashier and the other paperweights out of the barber shop and locking the door so he could focus on his work.
   The next day I knew that troubles were brewing. No one knew what to make of the situation. The goons of the intermediary busily whispered something to Madame Hitler in her office, and they looked over their shoulders when they saw me. Was this it for my project? Would I be kicked out of Egypt forever? Not a chance. Madame Hitler may not have been the most tactful manager in the world, but she wasn't stupid. When, possibly for the first time, she encountered someone who was doing work she wasn't going to listen to another company's blame-dumping. Not only would I stay to finish the project, but I had the feeling that I'd won her professional heart forever and that she wanted me to stay as long as possible, possibly as a sort of professional pet. That, as it turned out, was another problem.
   The plan was to send me home after two weeks. As the day approached my spirits soared. The tickets were purchased. The hotel was paid for. The limousine was arranged. (No way was I taking a regular taxi again.) The project was unfinished, but we'd arrived at point at which I could conceivably resume the work in Ireland without need of the hardware. Everything was set. The only problem was telling Madame Hitler about it. When I did that she hid her incensed reaction quite well, to the surprise of all her subordinates. I stood around, waiting for the managers to fight it out amongst themselves, somewhat worried that my guys would shrivel and defer to the awesome spectre of Madame Hitler. I had good reason, as I received news that my CEO wanted me to stay put. Furthermore, he was coming to Egypt and wanted to meet with me.
   I relayed the information to a delighted Madame Hitler, but later came to regret that I'd mentioned the CEO. As it turned out, he wanted to keep his visit to Egypt a secret from our customer, otherwise they might have wanted to speak with him and hold him accountable for being several years late in delivering the company's products. As we walked along the Nile river looking for a restaurant I discovered, to my horror, that he was actually there to see the man in whose face I'd yelled repeatedly. Now I was in for it. Would I be sent home immediately? Had my career self-destructed and disappeared in a humiliating puff of smoke? Before we hadn't walked very far it turned out that my CEO wasn't particularly fond of our intermediary company. In his opinion they viewed themselves as the dandiest bunch of geniuses in all Egypt, though not with any justification. I was off the hook.
It was then that we discovered that our restaurant had closed down, and so we took a taxi back to my hotel. It was good fun. I deservedly made fun of our obnoxious driver who ripped us off, and then we went to the hotel restaurant where the CEO entertained me and two co-workers from our Indian office.
   The end result of my labours at the bank paid off only partially. I left after one phase of the project was implemented. The customer argued over the details of the second phase, but I managed to escape before the details could be worked out. Along the way I had plenty of other adventures, mostly involving collapsing furniture, belly aches, idiot con-men, and a trip to Alexandria with my Indian co-worker during which we agreed that we were "making shit software for a shit country", but maybe that's a bit harsh. At least they make good clothes.