Dubai Syndrome

So, my mom flies clear across the world to come visit me and what do I arrange for Saturday morning? Used car shopping, part of every dream vacation. First we head over to the Ford dealership where I am looking at a stylish Ford Focus and dealing with this guy Sameer, who we like to refer to as our good friend Sammy. We met him last week and he had a car and was going to call and drive it out for us to see, sure, sounds great. Basically a week goes by with nothing, at one point I called and he is all excited and says "my eyes have seen it" as if that's supposed to make me feel more confident in the whole process. So, we give up on him, go to the dealership, find this lady to help us who ends up being just about worthless. She gives us her whole talking to and then gets this car all set for us to drive, we get in and as we are pulling out she sort of taps on the window and says, there's this sound, new tires, we'll put on new tires and it will be fine. A second later we hear the most awful sound ever and know there is no possibility we would ever purchase the car. It takes us forever to get back to the garage because everywhere we go is a one way street or some other problem. We practically ran out of the dealership. We then went to this other place and sit down to talk to our new best friend Kartik. He's looking through his inventory, ever the used car salesman, talking away about life in Dubai, we're sort of listening, but not really until he says blah, blah, blah, we call that Dubai Syndrome. I could not stop laughing, basically Dubai Syndrome is what happens to everybody that moves here, back in what I refer to as "my real life" I would handle things entirely differently, but because everyone here is so crazy, you end up becoming just as crazy as they are. Some examples of Dubai Syndrome Kartik gave us was: When you call someone and they say they're on their way, that means they are leaving their house. If they say they're stuck in traffic, that means they're still in their house. I'll call you back in 5 minutes, that means 30 minutes on a good day. I'll call you back in a half hour, that would be 3 hours if you're lucky. He went on and on, we were laughing the whole time. Needless to say, he said we could see the two cars he found that fit what we were looking for that evening or Sunday for sure. Uh huh, that happened. I just called him now and he said "what's your number, I tried to call you and some guy answered" I asked if that was part of Dubai Syndrome. He didn't find it quite as funny as I did. And no, I still don't have a car. I did just run home from work to let the random Internet guys into my house and left, I'm sure that was a good idea. The guy took one look at my mac computer and said we just may head home, macs are too hard. Seriously? With any luck I'll have Internet tonight, but I'm sure these Internet guys have Dubai Syndrome too, so I'm not expecting anything will work out as planned.