The Beginning
I guess if I'm going to post this in installments, I might as well start at the beginning.
It was a dark and stormy night...
Well, not really, but it was a bitterly cold January of 1994 at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Cincinatti. The Joint Mathematics Meetings are the big annual convention held jointly (hence the name) by all the major mathematical professional organizations. In addition to an orgy of research talks and book displays, they also hold a "job fair" to match up job seekers with open positions. Both applicants and employers benefit by only having to go one place to have as many as several dozen interviews in the course of a few days.
Unfortunately, the job market at that time still stank, so while the schools got dozens of interviews, applicants such as I were lucky to get 4 or 5. One of the interviews I did get was with UAE Univ. The director (equivalent to a Dept. Chair) was an older fellow from Mich. who had been lured out of retirement to take the position. Along with him were an ex-pat Arab Asst. Director, and an Emirati "money-man" who it seemed was there to make sure that the other two didn't squander his country's precious petrodollars.
The picture they painted of the country didn't seem all that bad, so I decided to apply, "just for the hell of it."
Did I mention that the job market then stank? Well, it turned out they were the only place to offer me a position. When I got the details: tax-free 12-month salary, free housing, free utilities, free transportation to-and-from plus a free ticket home every summer (or cash equivalent), $500 shipping allowance (each way), $7000 furniture allowance, and interest-free car loan, plus a severence bonus of one month's salary for every year of service, I figured that I'd have to make over $60,000 in the States to match it. That's pretty damn good wages in academia, especially for someone who only has a master's degree.
Needless to say, I accepted. I got the formal offer letter in April, and then started jumping through hoops. It was a very interesting experience getting tested for HIV when I wasn't in any known risk group, and the clinic didn't really have any mechanism in place to produce a sealed, certified, copy of the test results. The mandatory interview was rather amusing.
Cut to: August. Having sold or given away most of my possesions, I packed up what I had left (electronics, books, tapes, records, etc.), and coerced a friend with a pickup to help me transport them from Erie, PA to my mother's house in Silver Spring, MD, I sat back and waited for my plane ticket.
In the interim, I tried to teach my mother how to use email. This was 1994 remember, before the world wide web, before an ISP on every corner, and really even before Windows took off. I had no intention of lugging my 386 desktop, with a B&W screen, 1 MB of RAM, and a whopping 40 MB HD all the way over there, so I set her up with it, and my Compuserve account. She refused to use a mouse, and kept asking for keyboard shortcuts. I thought it would take about an hour, and it wound up taking the better part of 2 weeks.
Keep in mind, this is the woman who later would complain that the pause button on her VCR didn't work because when she pressed it, the TV station she was recording continued to play!
They finally sent me my ticket, and I was off to the UAE. I wasn't too apprehensive, as I had made sure to check that I was going to be allowed to return for my sister's wedding in October before I accepted the job. If things turned out really bad, I could always simply not return. Hell, I can take a month of just about anything.
I had also managed to start an email correspondence with an air traffic controller from Houston, who had been working in one of the Northern Emirates since Reagan fired them all in the early '80s. He assured me that my worst fears were groundless. The signs were all bilingual (Arabic and English), there were at least some women who didn't cover themselves from head to foot, and most of my videotapes weren't going to get confiscated.
Next Installment: What else did they lie to me about?