We regularly remind ourselves of our importance by whingeing about work. The office routine, the hunt for rare parking spaces, the tussle between departments for supremacy … it’s as if we are stars in a never-ending sitcom showing nowhere.
But in a rare moment of honesty, most of us would declare ourselves lucky to have a job that doesn’t threaten our very existence every day. Unlike some jobs that seem to need only one qualification: pluck, and lots of it.
As skyscrapers have begun to fill Qatar’s cityscape with their wondrous and weird twists of chrome and glass, we have to wonder, who will clean all those facades of glass panels and windows?
There are many companies that offer maintenance services to the office towers in Qatar, and abseiling workers, armed with cleaning materials, can be seen going about their work, as if hanging in harness hundreds of metres above ground with just a squeegee for company is nothing above the ordinary.
It’s unlikely these workers will ever have the chance to enjoy the architecture of the building like the regular visitor; they may have a better view than inhabitants of the tower’s interior, but it’s a vista filled with danger.
The scale of the job is also mind-boggling.
For example, for the world’s tallest tower, the 828-ft Burj Khalifa in Dubai, maintenance teams worked at a height of 2,717ft with 1,292,500sq ft of glass to clean before the landmark’s inauguration in January 2010.
As the Gulf goes in for mega towers, maintaining them in gleaming condition has become a lucrative business proposition for many companies. But it is important to ensure worker safety to avoid onsite accidents.
Most of Qatar’s residents still use metal gas cylinders for their domestic needs. The vending of these cylinders is one of those ‘only-in-Qatar’ experiences that punctuate our daily life here.
Loaded onto to open delivery trucks, the grimy (and sometimes dented) cylinders are usually manually carried into the customer’s house by intrepid workers. Lifting several of these (potentially inflammable) metal objects in a day, sometimes up many floors in apartment complexes, the gas cylinder delivery man’s job is not an enviable one.
As part of its modernisation drive, Woqod will be replacing the metal gas cylinders being used in Qatar with Shafaf, which are high-quality, transparent fibreglass and plastic composite LPG cylinders, within the next five years.
The extreme weather prevalent in the Arabian Gulf’s desert climes is a key factor that makes some jobs infinitely tougher than others in the region, historically, a magnet for migrant workers.
Dehydration and health problems related to working under thermally stressful conditions are common among the Gulf workforce employed in physical labour.
Which does put things in perspective when we grumble about how the Internet won’t fire up quickly at work.