United Arab Emirates: Appointment Alert!
From ExecutivePlanet.com
Making appointments
Generally, businesses in the UAE open at about nine in the morning, close for most of the afternoon and then re-open from late afternoon until mid-evening.
Government offices and banks open an hour or so earlier with the former not re-opening in the evening and the latter closing finally in the early evening. Government offices are open Saturday to Wednesday, inclusive. Banks are open Thursday mornings as well and most retail businesses observe a seven-day working week.
As in the west, the basic working week is 5 days, save that the week begins on Saturday instead of Monday.
The importance attached to courtesy and hospitality can cause delays that prevent keeping to a strict schedule. It is therefore customary to make appointments for times of day rather than precise hours.
Although prayer times vary around the year, current ones are always printed in the daily newspapers and the visitor should keep abreast of them when making appointments. Exact prayer times vary with the season, but the five daily prayers are as follows: Fajr [between dawn and sunrise], Dhuhr [about half an hour after mid-day], Asr [mid-afternoon], Maghrib [immediately after sunset] and Isha' [from an hour and a half after sunset]. Whilst not legally enforced, the dawn to dusk fast in Ramadhan should be respected in public as a gesture of common courtesy. As the Hijri calendar is lunar, Ramadhan [as well as all other months] advances an average eleven days per year against the Gregorian calendar.
It is often better not to book an appointment but merely turn up on the off chance. If you already know the person, you would be expected to pay an impromptu social call whenever in the area anyway. Of course, this works both ways, so that one must be prepared to tolerate others popping in on one's own business as well. Within reason, the higher the level, the better this works. A minister's diary is likely to be full well ahead, but by going around and being prepared to wait, there is a good chance of exploiting an unanticipated gap between appointments. It is always a good idea, however, to take along a letter that you can leave with the man's secretary should you not see him.
Unlike in the west, secretaries do not normally have authority to make appointments for their bosses.
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