By this stage I was sitting in the centre of Dubai wondering how on earth I was going to make this role work. I was living with some very generous hosts and their felines, who were good friends of the CEO (the humans not the cats). What had failed to be mentioned, and of course in a public blog possibly only hearsay, the couple were of the sharing, caring persuasion. I shall let you read between the lines on that one. 

A new indication that the job situation was not quite as rosy as I had hoped was the no-show of our CIO at one of the most important meetings I had set up in the region. We were meeting with a Sheikh and his investment team at one of the worlds largest Sovereign Wealth Funds. I was secretly chuffed I had managed to pull the meeting off as it had been quite a few months of animal behaviour with ferreting and squirrelling of data then following any trail I could. It was indeed unusual to get a meeting with this fund so quickly i.e. it had only taken 5 months. Unfortunately for my ego I doubt the fund I was working for was aware of this feat of endurance and perseverance.  Thirty minutes before we were to walk into this Superbowl style meeting, and waiting nervously for the taxi, my CEO casually let it be known the CIO hadn't caught his flight to get to the meeting. My CEO who had just flown in from a long haul trip, didn't seem to think this was an issue as I went into full heart palpitation mode?!

In the interest of providing some fair story telling, the markets were chaotic and the funds needed managing, but I was still a wee bit non-plussed as to why I hadn't been told early enough to postpone the meeting. The CIO was The Big Man and they had wanted to talk with him regarding portfolio and risk management techniques. I should point out this SWF, when allocating to alternative assets, do minimum chunks of $20 to $50 million dollars at a time. In my humble opinion this indicates they are important people to impress. But these big fat hints of incompetence were telling me that either I was hopelessly inadequate within my region, or the fund wasn't as interested as previously thought in the process of obtaining money from the middle east. Coupled with this chaos, the business etiquette I had provided had possibly fallen on deaf ears. It was with mortification I watched my CEO start bowing to the male administration assistant as we left the meeting floor. He was obviously so jet-lagged he thought we were in Japan and not the UAE. It was going to be a very long, lonely road!

Back to the vexatious cats. These cats were house bound animals meaning they were never allowed to go outside unless in a 1metre by 1 metre fully enclosed metal cage. They were minxy looking cats, like mini-me tigers, and even I thought they were model material. On this particularly weekend day I had been invited to a strangers wedding and as I love a good wedding (even if I don't know the bride or groom) I went along full of tearful enthusiasm. I am sure the bride and groom were a little confused when they saw me up the front of their wedding procession, joyfully exclaiming my best wishes to them. But as this was the middle east, and I was a stranger at their wedding, I was quite conservative with the alcohol consumption. OK, I did suffer from a brief interlude of teacher training at the end of the night, demonstrating a remarkable ability to drain the last of a tequila bottle with my mouth and no hands. I have no doubt my mother would have been so proud of my 'look ma - no hands' technique. 

When I got back to the house around 11pm I was a little startled to see all the household staff lined up on the couch looking extremely worried. My hosts were away that weekend in a European city frequenting clubs of a risque nature and hence I was the head of the house for all intense purposes. I had a little trouble understanding the heavily accented questions immediately directed at me but the jist of it was; what have you done with the cat?!?! It took me a good 20 minutes to actually understand this one panicked line from the staff. Mostly, they communicated all at once on that crowded couch, along with added vocals from some random members of next doors house help community. Once I understood and read the fear on their faces I looked at my phone and realised I had missed about 5 calls in the past hour or so. I sighed inwardly as I knew the cats were substitute babies and this was going to be an extremely stressful end to a night. Little did I know it was also going to lead into an incredibly stressful year thanks to those pesky pussies...