Sometimes, due to reasons including language, jobs and schedules, residents find most of their time spent with similar folk. When you start dividing Abu Dhabi’s ever-increasing population into groups, those individual groups can be relatively small, and sometimes uncomfortably close.
Written by: Laura Fulton
Take, for example, the case of my friend Cindy. As a jewellery seller from home, she often heads out across the city to meet customers, rather than have people come to her. On one such occasion, Cindy had to sit for 45 minutes, crawling as far as two blocks in the horrific midday traffic. So when yet another car cut her off just as she approached Al Wahda Mall, she lost the last of her patience.
Now she’s generally the politest of people, and would rather keep quiet than cause a fuss. But on this particular day she was hot and tired and when she was forced to slam on her brakes, her five-year-old daughter spilled apple juice all over herself and the back seat.
For once, Cindy was not going to take bad manners lying down.
She followed the errant driver into the car park and purposely parked nearby. When the driver got out, pink BlackBerry in hand, it was obvious the woman was in a hurry, but Cindy was at the end of her rope. She approached the woman and told her, firmly, but non-offensively, just how rude she’d been.
When the other driver tried to speak in her defence, Cindy simply put up a hand and walked away. Content with having said her piece, Cindy rushed inside to meet her potential client, prepared to apologise for being a few minutes late.
So it was with the worst sort of stomach-turning horror that she found the woman with the pink BlackBerry standing in the designated meeting spot looking around. A quick missed call – made from her hiding spot in a nearby shop – confirmed that the woman Cindy had just berated in the car park was the very same woman she was meeting to look at her jewellery.
Though it seemed the smallness of the community would be Cindy’s undoing, the outcome proved that living in a relatively small city is sometimes better than it seems. Wearing her chagrin like an overcoat, Cindy finally approached the woman and asked if she wanted to buy a bracelet. Both women laughed and apologised, and the encounter eventually led to plenty of happy commerce between the two.
Which just goes to prove that if you’re going to shout at a stranger in this city, it helps to be armed with lots of pretty jewellery. Just in case.
