Another day...another dose of God's favor

Another day of God’s favor. Sometimes I feel like I don’t deserve this, or am I just lucky…or extremely blessed. We had a meeting with Bahrain TV today. They called me to set it up. This is to get footage for our History of Bahrain Seaports documentary. They have over thousands of hours of footage in their archives. Our contact was a great admirer of Khalifa as he has shot a lot of footage in their archives. Khalifa is like a media rock star here.

I was a little worried about this project at first, because there just weren’t a lot of crews circa 4000 B.C. in Bahrain. So I knew I was going to have to be creative. Well Bahrain TV already found the footage that I needed. They have boats and seaport footage from 1930. Pearl divers from the 50’s in color, and loads of 70’s footage as well. It was like one stop shopping. The funny thing is, I tried to license Hamad and the Pirates from Disney about two months ago. That film you might remember me blogging starred Khalifa in 1970 as the star pirate. It played on The Wonderful World of Disney series. So after calling about 40 people in various legal departments of Disney, no one could give me an answer because no one knew where the film was. This was a pretty obscure film in the Disney archive obviously. So when you can’t find the answer…the answer is no. So here I was at Bahrain TV watching the same exact footage from Disney in the Bahrain TV archives. They are going to give me the same footage for free. Not only that, they had so many other great shots which is really going to enhance the documentary. It all seems like its happening too easy for me. I keep thinking maybe I should be working harder. I was just amazed at the spirit of cooperation that our rep. from Bahrain TV was giving us. It was like he was honored to help us. That is true Arab hospitality. Its just another reason why I love this place much. Reji was with me and I was gloating about God’s favor. He interjected…”I think its because you’re white.” Well Im not sure about that. I do get preferential treatment sometimes because of the color of my skin and my thick American accent (or so Im told I have an American accent, I didn’t think Americans had accents). I didn’t choose to win the genetic lottery, but God is blessing me nonetheless.

It was my goal to deliver the building of the mammoth Khalifa Bin Salman Port documentary today. This has been a 30 month project and is easily the largest and most important that KSDi has ever produced. We finished it at 4, yet I’m holding off on the delivery. We found some footage today at Bahrain TV which will enhance the project. So Im going to do a slight re-edit. We don’t have to do this, the project has already been approved and they are very happy with it. Still I want to go the extra mile and make it the best possible.

I had to be a tough boss today, and I don’t like doing that. Apparently there are a couple of people that are a bit addicted to the internet and facebook. So I had to turn off the internet privileges for a department. I hate being the bad guy, but I do have a responsibility to my employers. Now I felt a little hypocritical since Im on the net a lot…mostly for work, but sometimes for communicating to the U.S. But I rationalize, I’ve never missed a deadline and the company is looking like it might have a very good month despite Ramadan. So I don’t let it get in the way of my responsibilities.