Car inspection

[This post contains outdated information, I recommend going to my post of May 21, 2011 for the most recent information about car inspections]


Okay, here's the car inspection story I mentioned briefly in my last post.

In Qatar after your car is three years old you have to get it inspected on an annual basis to get the registration renewed. It involves checking out the car and testing things like emissions and so forth, I wasn't exactly sure what was being tested. Some friends of mine had been through it before and apparently it was a nightmare and they had to go back multiple times. So with that in mind their advice was:

1) take your car in for a tuneup before you get it inspected to make sure it passes; and
2) have a woman take the car to the inspection, because she will be put ahead of the men in the queue.

Since I'm not married (2) was not an option since I assume they would check things like ID or registration, otherwise by now I'm sure some women would be charging money to take people's car for inspection.

So I went to the dealership garage and told them that I will be taking the car in for inspection, so to take a look at it. They told me that since I was close to my 15,000km service they would do that. One hour and $125 later that was done. Now I had to get it to the inspection area, which I've been told always had a really long queue.

Luckily my friend Serdar and his wife were also going to get their car inspected so we went together on a Saturday. The inspection area was a parking lot adjacent to a shopping centre, where an inspection garage had been set up next to a mobile trailer, which was the office. There were two lineups, one with about a dozen cars and another with about 40 cars. Turns out the short lineup was for people who had made reservations while the longer one was from people who just showed up. Since I didn't have a reservation I was in the long lineup. A security guard handed me a piece of paper with a number and another guy in line got out of his car to tell me that I need to go into the office to get my official paperwork. So I left Serdar with my car and went in.

The office consisted of a TV, a water cooler, about 10 chairs up against the walls, and a single desk at the far end with about 10 people crowded around it yelling and waving papers at the lone beleagured clerk sitting at the desk. I'm now used to this sort of thing so I started wading into the crowd as well but I guess the clerk was already at his wits end and just started shouting to everyone "Sit down! Sit down!" in both English and Arabic. So we sat down and he started calling numbers, the first one being about five before mine. So while I sat there waiting for my number to be called more people came in to crowd around the desk, which caused some of the people who were sitting to get up and go to the desk as well and before long we had another crowd of people waving papers at the clerk. Poor guy.

Eventually, after about 20 minutes or so, it was my turn. It turns out the clerk was a very nice Algerian man and we had a chat while he processed my paperwork. When he saw that I was Canadian from my registration he even spoke to me in French (Algeria was once a French colony so it is still widely spoken there) but switched to English once he realised I was not from Quebec. He also gave me a couple of phone numbers and told me to call one of them to book an appointment, otherwise I would be in line for at least four hours! Since the thought of being in an open parking lot in 45 degree heat for 4 hours was not appealing in the least I decided to heed his advice, but then the guy behind me told me that he had an appointment and he had been waiting for over an hour already. Ugh, this was not looking good.

Anyway I went out to find that after 25 minutes my car had moved all of about five places in line. Luckily Serdar had made an appointment for his car so his wife was in the short lineup with it and would probably be another 15 minutes. So we went to the mall next door and got coffees while we waited for her to finish. Meanwhile I called the numbers and managed to book an appointment for Monday afternoon.

Fast forward to Monday afternoon. I leave work to drive across town to the inspection centre, to find that the lineups were much shorter (protip for anyone in Qatar reading this -- go on a weekday). The security guard told me that I had to go in to get my paperwork changed since it had the wrong date on it but since there were not as many people lined up for inspection it was easier to get to the Algerian clerk and get my paperwork reprinted. So within about 20 minutes I had my car inspected.

... and it failed! One of the rear brakes did not meet the required standards.

So I was told that I had to go get it fixed and come back to get it reinspected all over again. Aaaaaargh!

Tune in next blog post for part two of this saga -- Glen goes to get his car fixed.