Emirates and the fall

I joined Emirates Airline on the 1st or 2nd of January, 2008.

The job was what I had spent the previous decade preparing for. Project manager at one of the world’s most respected airlines. Dubai address. Salary that would let my family live the life we had been building toward. Brother and best friend already in Dubai. The set-up was, on paper, the dream job.

Within four to six months, the world changed.

The 2008 financial crisis was different from the inside than it was from the outside. From the outside, you read about it in the newspaper. Bear Stearns. Lehman. AIG. From the inside of a global airline based in Dubai, the crisis showed up as a sudden, internal conversation about headcount. Within months of joining, I was told that Emirates would be reducing its headcount significantly. The reduction would start with the most recent joiners.

I was on that list from the start.

What followed is the strangest period of my professional life. I knew I was on the list. The list was not secret. My managers knew. I knew. We all worked alongside each other knowing that I was on the list.

I responded by working harder. I took on every project I could. I won recognitions and awards from the head of the department. I got internal nods. I was the most engaged person on the floor, because I had the most to lose. The work I did during those two years is, by some metrics, the best work I had done in my career up to that point.

It did not save me.

In 2010, I was told I would be put through a new interview process. For my own job. A job I had been doing for two years. The new interview process was the formal mechanism for terminating people whose contracts could not be terminated for performance reasons.

Three months after the interview process started, I received the termination letter.

I want to put down what the day of the termination letter felt like, because the day is the part of the story that does not fit into the LinkedIn post.

I was thirty-four years old. I had two young children. My wife had been with me through Dubai, Pakistan, Qatar, and Dubai again. We had moved across three countries in seven years. The Dubai apartment was the most stable home we had ever had as a family. The Emirates job was the most stable position I had ever held.

The termination letter said the company would allow me to look for a new job inside the UAE for a period before my visa was canceled. I tried. The post-crisis Dubai market was hostile. There were no project manager positions opening in 2010. The companies that were hiring were hiring at junior levels and at much lower salaries. I could not find a job.

I started looking at options outside the UAE.

I discovered that I was eligible for the UK Highly Skilled Migration Programme. The HSMP was a points-based skilled-immigration system. I had all the points. I needed a bank statement showing a specific amount of cash, held for three consecutive months. I had the cash. I parked the funds. I waited the three months. I got the bank statement on the last day. I submitted the application with the entire package.

The application was rejected.

The reason for the rejection was that the reviewing officer at the UK Home Office had read my bank statement incorrectly. The statement covered the full three-month period. The header on the statement showed the from-and-to dates clearly. But the last transaction recorded in the statement was three weeks before the end of the three-month window. The reviewing officer interpreted this to mean that the statement only covered the period from the first transaction to the last transaction. He concluded that the statement covered two months and one week, not three months. He rejected the application on that basis.

There was no appeal process for Pakistani nationals.

I could have reapplied. The cost of reapplying was the application fee, plus another three months of holding the funds in the bank, plus the willingness to face the same lottery. I did not have the courage to reapply. I do not know if I am proud of that decision. I do know that the decision came at a moment when I had been fired from a dream job, denied an exit option from a country I could no longer stay in, and read incorrectly by a clerk in a UK Home Office whose name I will never know.

This was the lowest professional point of my life.

I had been at the worst point of my life once before, during the FSC vagabond years. The slap from my father had pulled me out of that point. I did not have a slap available to me at thirty-four. I had two children. I had a wife. I had a mortgage’s worth of obligations and no income. I had a degree, a decade of experience, and no path.

What I had was a wife who, when I told her we were going back to Pakistan, said okay. She did not flinch. She did not ask for an alternative plan. She started packing.

What I had was a father, Shafiq Khan Pitafi, who did not say anything resembling “I told you so.” He had spent his life giving me the funds and the permission to make my own decisions. He gave me the same again. He never once suggested I had failed. He never once made me feel small for coming back.

What I had was Allah. I want to write that line plainly because it is the truth of what I had. The five daily prayers were the structure inside which I held myself together that year. The Qatar years had taught me how to use that structure. The Dubai termination was the year I needed it the most.

We moved back to Pakistan.

I was thirty-four. I had been a project manager at Emirates Airline. I was now a returnee from Dubai with a two-month-old visa stamp that said I had been forced out. I had no income. I had two children. I had a wife. I had no idea what I was going to do next.

This is the chapter that ends with the floor. The next chapter is the chapter where the floor turns out to be the foundation.

The lesson of this chapter, if you want one, is the smallest one and the largest one.

The smallest lesson: bureaucratic systems will sometimes make decisions about your life that are based on errors. The clerk at the UK Home Office who rejected my application on a misreading was not malicious. He was just wrong. The bureaucracy that should have caught his error was not designed to catch errors of his kind. The decision stuck. My life turned on that decision.

The largest lesson: the floor is not the end of the story. The floor is where you find out what you actually have. I found out what I had. I had a wife who said okay. I had a father who did not say I told you so. I had two children who needed me to keep going. I had a religious tradition that gave me a structure for getting up in the morning. I had a degree, a decade of experience, and a network that was about to become more useful than I knew.

If you are reading this from your own version of the floor, what I want you to know is the same thing my father showed me on the day I came back to Pakistan from Dubai with my visa canceled.

The floor is not where the story ends. The floor is where the story continues from. The story does not always continue upward. Sometimes the story continues sideways, slowly, for years, before it turns. The years on the floor are not wasted. They are where you find out what is actually load-bearing in your life.

The next chapter is about the year I started DevBatch.