Independence in Saudi Arabia
In mid December '86, I was out of work. Nothing turned up in the short term, but I had an open offer from Al-Falak to work for them. I went out to Saudi in early January '87, to set up a Software Products Division for Al-Falak.
This was guaranteed to be different. My idea was that I could go out for a relatively short time, pick up some worthwhile experience, and come back into a new job in the UK 18 months later. Needless to say, it didn't work out like that.
I got a £35,000 base salary, plus a car, housing in a compound, thirty days holiday and a free family ticket return to the UK every year. That was good. Working days were Saturday to Thursday (half day on Thursday, but I rarely left before 4pm). Five times a day work was interrupted by the call to prayer; this didn't affect offices, but made shopping trips chancy.
Only a few months later, Computer Associates bought out UCCEL. This didn't exactly upset me, but it meant that we would shortly be out of our main product line, and I had to diversify fast.
After three and a half years, I was still there. I had built up the business reasonably well; we represented all of the decent mainframe software companies, employed eight people in the division, and planned to turn over about $2.5M that year. However, since Andrew was born in '87, he hadn't been well. At six weeks he almost died with a very low red blood cell count, recovering only after a transfusion and a hospital stay. There was no explanation for this. He was then slow to grow, and at eighteen months started to suffer from rectal prolapses. Eventually, they sought to test for coeliac disease and cystic fibrosis. The modern medical equipment at the Aramco hospital in Dhahran couldn't get a decent sweat sample, so I arranged for a trip back to the UK for testing. Andrew definitely had CF, but David and Michael were clear.
We received the diagnosis in May, and made arrangements to leave Saudi and come back to the UK, without a job. I finally left in July, just a week before the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq.
