TABUK, 5 September 2006 — Quick! Everyone into the principal’s office! This was the scene at a girl’s school here when a maintenance crew was scheduled to do some repairs on the school’s interior, the Al-Watan daily reported yesterday. After noticing the men inside the school, the principal ordered all teachers to get their covers on and huddle in the main office until they could figure out what the men were doing in the building. It turns out that school officials had told the men to carry out the repairs in the morning but had failed to inform the teachers. The husband of one of the teachers got so upset at the horrible thought of a repairman seeing his wife’s face that he complained to the maintenance company for not scheduling the work until after the women had gone home.
Beggar Allegedly Has Bank Account, Stocks
DAMMAM, 5 September 2006 — A bank in Dammam has reportedly been handling the daily deposits of an elderly Saudi woman who is an alleged beggar, the daily Al-Watan reported yesterday. The newspaper says that the woman comes in every day with deposits between SR15 ($4) and SR300 ($80) she supposedly gets from begging. One bank employee is quoted as saying the woman owns a stock portfolio and has SR35,000 ($9,333) in a savings account. The story says the woman enters the bank with confidence, but when she leaves she puts on her beggar’s face of desperation to cheat more suckers on the street. The story did not explain why a bank employee would divulge the details of anyone’s personal account information to the press. But regardless, the moral of the story has been made: Beggars are secretly wealthy stockholders and only look poor and dig through the trash to sucker you out of two riyals when you leave the grocery store.
