Page 118 - Adobe Photoshop PDF

Bela introduced me to all the management at the Headquarters in
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son. Mr. Mac, as he was universally known, was a fabulous character.
He had emigrated from Scotland as a teenager, had gone to work for So-
Cal without a college education and had risen rapidly through the ranks
before transferring to Aramco. He was a brilliant psychologist. Every
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them a rousing pep talk about the potential of their new company. Mr.
Mac used to tell them, “We are going to become the biggest oil produc-
ing company in the world.” Many experienced oil people laughed at that
idea, but not in the meeting (within a few years thereafter he was proven
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the typical new employee, due to the shortage of family housing, would
have to wait for family housing until the beginning of his “second con-
tract” (each two year tour was referred to as a “contract” because the
original employees had come to Arabia on two year legal contracts).
Mr. Mac had the wonderful approach of going home from work to have
dinner with his wife and two children, but then going to the dining hall
to have a dessert at a table where any employee could sit down and talk
to him to express their opinions, problems, facts about the status of their
operations, etc.

A couple weeks later, I went over to Manama, the capital of Bah-
rain. We went by launch from the company pier at Al Khobar. Bahrain
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Awali, nearly all the expatriates were British. In meeting some of them,
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to be at least 10 to 20 years older than their chronological age. The Brit-
ish fellows spoke of us Americans as being “softies” because our homes
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conditioning, and only recently had they had air conditioning in the bed-
rooms. After being around them it struck me that the excessive drinking
that was typical of the British and the chronic lack of good night sleep
because they had lacked air conditioning made a terribly debilitating
combination.

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