The other night I was at the departure lounge of the south terminal at the airport seeing someone off. It was past midnight, and as I walked in I was greeted with a stifling and suffocating cloud of heat.
Extremely uncomfortable in that stale and hot air of the closed terminal and drenched in sweat, I could not wait for the flight time to approach to see my party off. As I walked off the premises, I noticed others suffering a similar fate. Those traveling had it much worse, dressed as they were in jackets and ties, or long gowns under heavy “abayas”.
The next morning, I read in the paper that the air-conditioning system at the terminal was malfunctioning. That was fine until I started reading the explanations given for this situation. The units were old, they were beyond repair, parts were not available, and the system was obsolete, etcetera, etcetera, and etcetera!
Additionally, there was a footnote that a contract had been signed with a company to modernize the cooling equipment. This was after a paragraph mentioning that a similar contract had been signed a couple of years ago to study the cooling problems at the airport terminals.
Now I may be ignorant about a lot of things in life, but I am not that stupid. In the first place, such systems do not go obsolete overnight. It is an indication of shoddy management by the airport authorities who chose to place their priorities in other things than the comfort of the passengers.
This is further evidenced by such patronizing and lofty statistics released every now and then about how many passengers were handled through Jeddah airport.
Do I really care if there were 3 or 4 million passengers who went through the counters and turnstiles at the airport, or do I care about my comfort when I frequent such places? Or should I wonder if the same hot and unbearable conditions prevail in the airport director general’s office?
Chances are his facilities are cooled by a much newer and separate system and he does not have to suffer similar torment as the poor passenger who, to add insult to injury, have to pay a SR50 departure tax from this same facility.
And why do we wait twenty years or before a system goes awry before we spring into action? What do these civil servants do in the meantime in those twenty years? Departmental heads of public sectors should be serving the needs of the general public. But in this situation, it seems to me that it has been the other way around. We are at their mercy. And at the mercy of their inactivity!
Blame who you may as head of a public sector. Because as things are going nowadays, the buck can always be shifted to somewhere else. After all, it is never your fault! And I was born yesterday! — Tariq A. Al-Maeena ([email protected])