Still Transferring...

I talked to the publishing company over the weekend, and while they were willing to pay the fees associated with transferring my iqama to them, understandably, they wouldn't pay any of the previous fees.  They advised me that I could take my first company to court and try to recoup those fees, which is something the bald Egyptian guy also told me I should try to do.

So, I decided that I would go ahead and cough it up and pay the money, knowing full well that it wasn't likely that I would ever see that money again.  To get the reward, you have to be willing to take some risks.  So I went to the college Sunday morning, with some hope that perhaps everything would get completed that day.

I started in HR and told my bald Egyptian friend that I would pay, or more accurately, that they would deduct it from my December salary.  He ignored me and launched into his usual diatribe about why I hadn't learned Arabic and finally, after about 20 minutes he called in Dr. Abdullah who took me to see Dr. Salah for final approval.  He told me that they needed me to rewrite my resignation letter without all of the negative things in it, that just said I was resigning for personal reasons.  Even though all of the things I had said in my previous resignation letter were true, the biggest reason I wanted to leave was more or less personal, because I wanted to take this other job, so I agreed to re-write it.

We found a computer and I typed up a quick resignation, but that computer was not hooked to a printer, so while someone took it on a flash drive to find a printer, I wrote it by hand and we took it to Dr. Salah, who passed it on to Dr. Salem, who sent it back to Dr. Salah.  It seems no one was really sure what the process should be.  Finally, they both signed it and we went back upstairs to the HR office.

The bald Egyptian greeted me again, and even though we had already been through it this morning, proceeded to chastise me because I hadn't managed to learn any Arabic between now and when I had last seen him.  Finally, he checked to see if the man who needed to sign everything and approve this issuance of my check was in.  He was not.  So we waited.

We waited until 3:30 and finally, the bald guy told me he must not be coming in that day.  He told me to bring a request letter from my company the next day and they would finish everything.  Since I was still teaching at night, and had to come to Al Farabi in the evenings anyway, I asked him if I could give it to him tomorrow night instead of during the day.  He said that would be fine, but the man who needed to sign everything wouldn't be there at night.  So I asked him If I needed to be here for him to sign the things, or could they just have him sign the things and issue my final pay, and then I would come pick it up at night.  He seemed to think that could work out, so I left.  Only 6 hours late.  Not so bad for Saudi.