The Blame Game

As many of my fellow Qatar-based expats can confirm, banking services here leave a lot to be desired. However, even by the low standards that I've gotten accustomed to, the events of the past 24 hours warrant special mention.

It started the 25th, which is payday each month at Qtel. The electronic deposit of my paycheck wasn't completed until after 6 pm--several hours later than usual--and the funds were still not made available as of bedtime.

This morning I checked, and finally QNB was showing that my paycheck was available. Good news. Unfortunately, I needed to withdraw cash and discovered that the ATM in our compound was out of service, and the ATM in Qtel Tower gave me a cryptic message about being "unable to process" my transaction. I called QNB and was told (thankfully) that there was nothing wrong with my card or my account, but of course no explanation was given as to why I couldn't withdraw cash with a properly-functioning card from an account that had plenty of funds.

After work this evening the compound ATM still wasn't working, but we headed out to do our grocery shopping assuming we would be able to use a credit or debit card. Unfortunately, the staff at Carrefour notified us that their machines weren't working for any credit or debit transactions due to an issue with QNB. Since we aren't in the habit of carrying large sums of cash, we had to leave our full cart at the checkout register, and exited the store muttering a few choice expletives about QNB.

Ella and I shared a chuckle about how well the term "qatarded" fit the whole experience--apologies to the mentally challenged, as this label is a bit unfair to them--and I started a mental sketch of a blog post that would describe the issues we've had with QNB. (It would be a very long post.)

Fast forward to later in the evening. I'm dropping off my shirts at the cleaners and chatting with a friendly, distinguished-looking Qatari gentleman who jokingly tells the Pakistani at the counter that I'm Steve Martin after I give the guy only my first name. (I don't think the store clerk got the reference.) The Qatari gentleman asks where I'm from, and responds "very nice" when I say I'm from the U.S. Then he asks where I work, and I say I work for Qtel. He then tells me that Qtel's network to QNB has been down all day so that no credit card transactions can be posted. Oops.

While I don't have a problem poking fun at QNB when I encounter a problem that arises out of their complete incompetence, it sounds like in this case there may be a bit more to the story than I'd thought. In any event, we'll just cross our fingers that tomorrow we can finally take out cash, buy our groceries, and do all of the things we used to take for granted.