One more quick update

You may recall my entry about the unfortunate demise of one of my co-workers, Fredrick Rodney, quite a number of months back.  (Here's the link to his Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/frederick.rodney.3)  Well, here's a quick update: his body is still in KSA.  Apparently the step brother refused to accept the body even though all the paperwork was finally completed before Ramadan (July 17th) and he did not have to pay the freight for the body.  The step brother apparently still wanted any and all money that Fred left.  The body should have been on the plane with us. Sadly to say, Fred was still 'on ice'.

In any event, he will, at some time in the near future, be buried here in Saudi Arabia.  We will hold a small memorial service for him with his friends who are still in the country.  He will go on to enrich the soil, what there is of it as he was trying to enrich the minds of the students who are similarly under fed from the tree of knowledge.  Rest easy great man!

Fred would have appreciated the irony that his body had to have an official 'exit visa' even though Fred had already made his final exit.  Governments are never satisfied unless they can add another layer of cost, bureaucracy and obfuscation.  I guess it really can be more difficult to get out of KSA and back into Canada than the other way round.  I can still hear Fred chuckling about this little kerfuffle.  The Canadian Embassy was as useless a the somethinmummble on a boar hog and not a pretty.  While the KSA side needed to have all documents translated into English; The Saudi's insisted that each English document produced by the Canadian Globerment must be officially translated back into Arabic.   The next level in the evolution of bureaucracy just might get us to the level were absolutely nothing can get done in a legal manner under less that the gestation period of a elephant of which the offspring will suckle at it mother's teat for 3 or more years and it will learn it's true delight in said  bureaucracy  while all the time morphing into some more out-of-touch bureaucratic nightterror seemingly ready to drag you in and trap you in the same Twilight zone CR, the purgatory of possibilities.  I hope someone has a nice Canadian Flag and we could get a couple of the lads to bring their non-existent AK 47s for a 21 gun salute.  I think that would be a nice touch.  His ghost must still be hanging around the compound - main campus or the apartments or even the coffee shop opposite the Farm Grocery store in the Kalid Mall.

All I'm sayin' is that if I ever meet that slug of a step brother I'll do a little more than pour salt on him.