I recently read another travel bloggess who pointed out that living in a foreign country is a constant, daily struggle to do ordinary things. She wasn’t complaining. Like me, she seems to love her life abroad, but when she described her own battles with visas, banks and other things we barely consider in our home countries she painted a picture of riding the metro back from yet one more frustration in tears, consoling herself with a kinder Bueno bar, and I laughed. Not at her pain, but at my own. It was briefly joyous to see that I was not alone and to remember that all of us who choose this life are facing the same struggles no matter what country we land in.

That being said, my recent trials and tribulations with the phone and bank systems here in Saudi have finally taken a positive turn.

First the phone.

When last we left our intrepid heroine in Episode III, she thought that the phone issue was resolved in her favor, having achieved the unlimited data plan on the prepaid SIM. Oh, but wait. Remember that post paid bill? The one I couldn’t pay because I hadn’t been able to open a bank account because my name was spelled wrong on my Iqama? It came back. Finally able to pay it, I went online only to discover that I had been billed for another month even though the phone company had turned off the line, and I’d gone into the store to switch to the prepaid.

The bill, which should have been 200SAR for the one month I used it, and had been inflated to 275 for reasons I never understood, had been inflated a further 200 to 475 while I was waiting for my bank account to open so I could pay it. Not from late fees, like we expect in the US, but from a whole other month of active billing on a SIM card that had been deactivated and was in a box!

I went online to the chat help place. The first time, they said they had to send the issue to “Technical Support”. I feel like this is a language barrier issue, because I’m like no, it’s not tech support, it’s billing, but the guy refuses to help me further and says I have to try again after 24 hours so Technical Support for Billing can look at the issue.

24 hrs later I try again, get another dude, who after some time finds that the resolution is that my account has been credited 175SAR.. not the full 200, but better than nothing. The big problem is that his English is so bad, I don’t understand this the first 4 times, because he just keeps copy pasting the same grammatically confusing answer. I don’t know if these guys are using Google Translate or some automated answer system, but I was on the English support site, so it’s not like I was expecting regular people to speak English, I was expecting the people hired for the job of helping English speakers to do so. Silly me.

He also kept calling me “sir” over and over, even though I kept saying I was not a “sir”. Once I finally figured out the credit issue, I then said, ok, lets cancel the line so I never get billed again. But he can’t do that, I have to go into the store… again. You know, the people who wouldn’t let me pay the bill with cash and didn’t bother to tell me that them turning off the service to the line was not the same as the line being cancelled.

While going around about this, trying to find some other way, he called me “sir” again and I once again asked him to stop doing that. Him: “Do you mean you’re a woman?”

Me: “I am.”

Him: “What?”

Me: “You call women ‘miss’ or ‘ma’am’, not ‘sir’.”

At which point he apologized, told me he could not help me and disconnected.

Maybe he was just tired of trying to explain the company rules and policies to me. After all, I’m used to being able to pay a bill or cancel a service on the phone or the internet, and it seems to me that having that technology, Saudi would want to use it to keep more women at home? But it sure seemed like he flipped out and ran when he realized he’d been talking to a woman. *shrug.

So the next workday, a Sunday, I get online and pay the 275SAR that was my first bill, leaving the rest unpaid (the supposed credit is not reflected in my account). I head back to the store after Asr (afternoon prayer) and have another protracted, whining conversation with the poor guy designated to help the women folk. We can’t go in to the main store unaccompanied. I guess the only reason I was able to go in when I went to set up my phone the first day was because a male co-worker was with me (to get a router for himself) and they assumed we were married. It’s the same guy who helped me the last time with the bill I wasn’t allowed to pay and getting the prepaid card up and running.

I explain the situation to date. He says I have to pay 74SAR to cancel it. Why? because 475 – 275 that I paid, -175 credit which should equal 25, but I’ve been billed 49 more SAR for the part of the month since the last billing cycle! I think this might be worse than late fees or interest. If you can’t pay for some reason, you both get your phone cut off and continue being billed at the full rate until you can? Technically avoiding the sin of usury while still sticking it to the people, what an astonishing grasp of capitalism!

I explain the absurdity of the fact that the company turned off the phone line, it was not my choice to stop using it, so why am I being billed for a phone line they turned off? The clerk says he can escalate it to STC (isn’t that where I am?) and I can come back another day. Another day!?! I feel like I’ve been fighting this battle for months (which I probably have) and cannot face the idea that I must arrange with the driver yet another day, to get home from work and wait the hour until prayer is ended to get back into my abaya and hijab and ride through traffic and wait in this tiny boring room to be told once more that it can’t be done. Suddenly 74SAR seems like a small price to pay to just be finished.

Fine! Fine. Finefinefine. I’ll pay.

So he goes away again and comes back to tell me that I’ll get a text message with the final amount and once I pay it they can cancel the phone… at this point my eyes are twitching involuntarily. He’s telling me that he’s still not cancelling the phone! I’m not receiving a text. The phone number that I’m cancelling is not the SIM in my phone. No problem, he says, the battle cry of the Saudi, I can put it in the phone when I get home and I’ll see the text.

There’s a moment I experience where I’m so incredibly frustrated, angry, whatever that I cross over some kind of event horizon, and enter the eye of the storm. I become unreasonably calm. This happened.

I patiently explained that I would never recieve this text, because the SIM was suspended by the company and would not receive texts. I know this because it is how I found out the number was suspended in the first place. No problem! he says, it can still get texts from STC. No. The calm is a physical force at this point. It can’t. Punctuation stabbing at the pauses between words, silently containing my outrage. I know it can’t because when I first noticed the line stopped working, I tried to log in to the website to figure out what was going on. They text you a PIN to log in, and I never got those texts, so couldn’t log in to the website. Those texts were from STC. I distinctly remember thinking how ridiculous it was that the company blocked my ability to receive it’s own messages including those about billing.

I remembered that the last time I was in the store to pay the bill, he had asked me for an ATM card (which I did not have yet, and for some reason a credit card wouldn’t do). But since then, I had opened my bank account and had my shiney new ATM card. Why can’t I just pay it now?

What? I can? Oh yay!

So he has me step outside so I can enter the main store (where I was not allowed to be 30 seconds ago) so I can swipe my ATM card and enter my PIN to authorize payment. This is another mind boggling aspect of the culture here. If it’s so important to separate women (for whatever justification) then why don’t you have a payment option for the separate women’s enclosure? And if we’re going to come in the main branch to pay, why keep us out at all?

Finally, I have paid the bill and am given the cancellation paperwork to sign. The line is paid in full and cancelled. I recieve texts on the prepaid line, now the only one linked to my Iqama, to tell me as much and breath a deep sigh of relief. A huge amount of frustration and about 525SAR later, I’ve learned that post-paid phones in Saudi are a total rip-off. But now I’m free.

Next, the bank.

As you may have surmised from the above, our intrepid heroine has managed to acquire a bank account since her last adventure. The new Iqama arrived and I learned that the way that the Saudis make the hard “ch” sound with no equivalent sound in their alphabet is to put the letter “teh” in front of the letter “shin” looking rather like “tsh” and I can sort of see how that sounds like “ch” so there you go.

I take my shiny new Iqama and a huge wad of cash (my savings since I started getting paid in September) down to the bank during school hours (the company has to give us time from work to do any company related banking). We got there early enough that I got a number only 2 up from the “being served” and I sat down to wait. My number called, I was given many forms to fill out, and sat down with my lovely unlimited internet phone to gather all the info I needed. I no longer have an active phone in the US (I can’t tell you how much I look forward to the globalization of mobile phones). I only have an address because my roommate decided to let me keep my name on the lease and stuff in the closet while I was gone. But you need both to open a bank account in Saudi, in addition to an address and phone number in Saudi. Who maintains two addresses and phone numbers in two different countries? The clerk suggested maybe I put my father’s phone number down, and without trying to explain that complexity, I suggested my mother’s instead, which was accepted. So, hey, mom, by the way, my Saudi bank has your cell phone on file as my US phone number 😀

Lots more paperwork later, I get my ATM card and a print out with all the necessary bank numbers and info like account and IBAN numbers. I am then directed upstairs to the tellers to deposit my cash. Victory! I have an account, there is money in it, I can pay my phone bill, buy my own airline tickets with SADAD and start sending money home!

I can’t link my Saudi account to my US account from the US end. I can open a paypal account in Saudi, but can’t link it to a bank account like you can in the US. So my only send money home option is to link the US to the Saudi account on the Saudi end. Which I am assured I can do online. So I hop on the website to discover that the security regulations are a little over the top. Not just the first, but every time you log in, they send you a new code via text. Then while adding the account (called a “beneficiary” on the website) I have to receive several more texted codes to enter and verify myself. In the end, I have to forward a text to another number. I get a text back telling me to call “Sambaphone” to activate the beneficiary.

So, I hunt around and find this entity, call it, enter my exceedingly long ATM number (even though I am calling from the phone linked to my account) and am then told that I cannot use Sambaphone because I don’t have a secret Sambaphone code and that I must go to an ATM or branch to get a secret Sambaphone code. Now, why in the world the bank didn’t have me create this code when I opened the account and chose my ATM pin I will never know. I’m sure if I were Saudi, I’d know I needed to ask, but of course I didn’t know, so now I have to go back to the bank.

Setting up the phone code was pretty easy. And I decided since I was in the bank, it would be easier to just have them add my US account while I was there. Except the clerk had no idea how. When the online attempt failed, I had recieved a text message telling me to remember to include the ABA (routing number, which is what US banks still use instead of an IBAN, because we can’t join the rest of the world in using metric, Celcius or international banking codes). I have my ABA, but there is no place on the form to enter it.

I explain all this to the clerk, that I know what the ABA is and have it, but I just don’t know where to put it. Neither does he. So who can we ask? Surely someone in this building somewhere knows how to do this? But no, he’s going to do it himself. He takes me over to a terminal and has me log in to the website and go through the process of adding the beneficiary again, because he is sure the reason it didn’t work was because I didn’t have my Sambaphone code so I couldn’t complete the final verification step (despite the fact that I showed him the text about the ABA). We then use the Sambaphone to submit the final authorization and he tells me it may take a few days to be fully set up but everything is fine now. I mention again that we did not enter the ABA, so I doubt this, but he is sure and we are done.

Even before I get home that day, I get a text from the bank identical to the first, letting me know it failed and not to forget the ABA.

At least now I have my secret Sambaphone code, so I can call the help line, which I do when I get home. The phone tree takes so long, that right before I get to a real person, I run out of minutes and the call is cut off (the phone knows it’s been defeated so it’s getting in some last jabs on the way down). So I get dressed once more to head over to the convenience store to buy more minutes where my day is very briefly enlightened by the little old Yemeni man who sometimes works the counter. He has the talent that many grandfatherly types have of complimenting you like a father rather than a lecher, so he makes me feel good. Up until that day, I’d never used any Arabic with him, but that day I asked for the phone minutes using Arabic numbers and he was so amazingly happy to hear me do so, I thought he would turn inside out.

Bolstered by positive human interaction, armed with plenty of phone minutes, I return home and call the Sambaphone. Finally get a real person and explain the issue once more. The answer? Use the second address line. Put the whole bank address in the first line, and in the second line type “ABA” then a space then the number. Why? Why make an online form that requires specialized non-intuitive knowledge of what to put where? Why can’t you just write a few lines of code and add an ABA box????

Anyway, this man seemed to know exactly what I was talking about and explained the solution very clearly, so I had a lot of hope as I logged back on and tried the solution. Of course, these form lines have limited characters, so the whole address doesn’t actually fit in the first address line so I remove spaces and abbreviate everything I can and hope it works.

After waiting a couple days with no failing text messages, I log back on the website to see that the beneficiary is now listed as “active”! Still cautious, I send myself a mere 25$ to test the transfer. The fee is 50SAR regardless of the amount transferred, but I feel like it’s worth it to make sure it works before sending thousands, because I can’t even imagine the nightmare if the connection wasn’t working and all that money left my Saudi account and never arrived in the US one. Trust but verify.

After a couple more days, I check my US account and LO! the money is THERE! Happy victory dances ensue, celebrations and affirmations! Endorphins run wild! After 5 months in Saudi, my dwindling US savings running dry paying student loan and insurance bills while no new money comes in, I can finally use the money I’m earning to accomplish the financial goals I set out to do when I took this job! Staring at that tiny transfer, I felt like I’d just made the Death Star run with the guidance computer turned off, and I could hear the pumping brass of the “Throne Room” music ringing in my ears as Princess Leia gave me a medal for defeating the Empire.

I also managed to file my US taxes entirely online this weekend, and should be receiving that refund direct deposit soon. I don’t think I’ve been so excited to be able to pay bills since I cleared out the last credit card.

I realize too that if my stories keep following Lucas, that the next episode is not going to be good for me. Whatever the bureaucratic equivalent of loosing a hand or being frozen in carbonite is, I don’t want to find out.  Inshallah, I never will.