Office politics and heat madness

Qatar offers a unique work environment for the western expat. It’s the sort of country where qualified professionals are in such short supply you can find yourself promoted into a managerial position simply because you’re the last person standing.

If you have the stomach to deal with all the petty rivalries, inter-departmental sabotage and screaming meltdowns that characterise day-to-day work life, you can quickly climb the corporate ladder.

Indeed, one of the country’s biggest drawcards is the fact you can cram several years worth of promotions and corporate grinding into a handful of summers. By the time you feel dead on the inside and ready to catch the next flight out, you’ll have leap-frogged your colleagues back home and have a LinkedIn profile that suggests far more experience than you actually have. You may also have a serious drinking problem, but that’s another story.

The point is, you need to stick it out for a few years in order to reap the rewards. And that’s easier said than done when your office staff comprise a lot of undiagnosed mental patients.

Granted, office politics are a factor in any company, but Qatar has elevated petty workplace dramas to explosive new heights. This can be attributed to a number of factors including:

· Heat madness

· Impossible to navigate bureaucracy

· A melting point of divergent cultures

· The general stress of completing even the simplest tasks.

All the above creates a powder keg atmosphere that can be set off at any time by the most innocuous events. But here’s the rub: Normal, well-adjusted people don’t usually relocate to the middle of the desert. It takes a certain kind of disposition to end up out here.

Someone once told me that everyone in Qatar is either running away from or running towards something. Whatever it is they’re doing, most of them seem incapable of achieving it without screaming at colleagues, bursting into tears, becoming obsessively territorial, trying to fuck over random people and ultimately suffering a complete mental breakdown.

You can find more tips on living and working in Qatar in my book — God Willing: How to survive expat life in Qatar.