The joke goes that a contractor hired three workers to erect several lampposts on a desert road. The contractor asked the first worker to dig, because he was fast in doing that, and asked the second to place the huge pole in the hole using his strength, and asked the third to fill the hole around the pole and press it.

The contractor, after supervising them for few days, each in his own specialty, and making sure that each one of them knew what to do, he left them on their own for few days because of the heat to run some errands. When he returned about a week later, he found out that things were going better than expected at the start of the project, but as he came closer to the workers, he found one of them digging very fast, while another filling it even faster, and they kept doing so without noticing him. The contractor screamed, asking them to stop, and asked them what were they doing, so one of them answered that their third colleague did not come for two days, and they continued according to his clear instructions regardless of any development!

I remembered that story when I noticed, five times, over the past two months, the workings of Kuwait International Airport security. In the past 10 years, they allowed entry to check-in counters only from a certain security gate through which people passed through with their luggage through metal detectors, while passengers left the hall through another gate located on the other side where it had only direction, which is an exit.

But the airport administration or security systems changed the check-in procedures, and shut the metal detectors before weighing the luggage, which may have been moved somewhere else, and allowed all people to enter the halls with their luggage without inspection. Yet the exit gate remained in place with its metal rods that allows exit and bans entry, and a security guard that belongs to a private company guards it. When I tried to enter from it and return to the hall, the guard prevented me from doing so, so I told him that I can enter the hall from any other gate. He replied in his Bangladeshi accent, "I know this," and "this is not his business," adding he was asked to keep people from entering from this side.

This reminded me of the digging and dumping workers who continued to perform their jobs honestly, despite the lack of benefit from what they were doing due to the absence of the pole placement man. Oh, you nation!

- Translated by Kuwait Times from Al-Qabas

By Ahmad Al-Sarraf