In the past 30 years I have seen office space shrink at an alarming rate (No exit for cube rats, May 13). Many companies are condensing office space in a bid to reduce expenses. But are the changes reducing productivity? Does spending all day, every day in close proximity to your colleagues create collaboration or discontentment? Do they spend too much time talking about non-work items or topics outside their area of focus? If so, the changes have been a waste.
Hopefully, people will look back in 20 or 30 years and wonder how workers of the 2010s survived such “primitive” conditions.
Owen Neale, Iraq
Money can’t buy a romantic life
Your article Getting married in the UAE (May 13) gives some enjoyable tips on how to splash out for a wedding. But by calling Dh200,000 a "mid-range" price tag, it reads like a puff-piece for the wedding industry. That is a ridiculous sum for average earners to spend. Far better to put it aside for education or a house.
My wife and I got married decades ago in a Hong Kong registry office for the equivalent of Dh1,000. This may seem cold and utilitarian. But the romance in a marriage is within the relationship, not the extravagance of the wedding.
Mark Fisher, Dubai
No longer a pertinent issue
The article One hundred years on: the Sykes-Picot Agreement and a legacy of bloodshed (May 13) is quite biased, as it promotes judgments and violence. Blaming decisions that were made 100 years ago as the cause of today's conflicts is quite irrelevant.
During the First and Second World Wars, Europeans were killing each other over their boundaries. More than 20 million were killed. The last war was only 70 years ago and it’s been already decades that we live all in peace within the same union.
Thomas Mnt, Dubai
Learn from the UAE’s example
This country has shown that it's possible to wage a war against crime, injustice and oppression (UAE sends 17 boatloads of aid to Mukalla, May 10). I admire the UAE for what it has been doing to alleviate the suffering of the people of Yemen.
We know how some of the most powerful countries in the world have waged disproportionate wars in some countries, in the process impairing the lives of people of those countries permanently. Once their selfish targets were met they pulled out, leaving the people to fend for themselves. Wasn’t it the responsibility of those powerful nations to help the poor people rebuild their lives?
The mighty world teaches morals and ethics to the rest of the world. They should practise what they preach. At least they should feel ashamed by looking at the UAE’s example. Hats off to this country.
Mohammed Abu Bakr, Al Ain
Good news for everybody
Knowing that a credit bureau was coming, I took a car loan to establish a credit record (UAE banks have to be made accountable for admin errors, May 14). On Christmas Day in 2013, a repossession notice was delivered to my home, informing me that my loan was behind and "other efforts" to contact me had gone unanswered. Really?
This was the first contact I had from the bank and I made every single payment on time and had the ATM deposit receipts to prove it.
Ten months and countless hours of frustration later, after threatened to file an official complaint with the Central Bank and with the consumer rights department, they finally agreed to reverse the penalties and fees, but still could not find one of my deposits.
In the end, I paid that instalment twice just to get away from the grossly incompetent large multinational bank, which one would think would have far better record-keeping practices. As I told them, I was their customer, not their hostage, a distinction that was lost on them.
Name withheld by request
