The Barnacle & The Whale

If you are a fan of the majestic creatures that grace our oceans (unfortunately in declining numbers), then chances are you probably heard of the crustacean creatures that latch on to them, for a full-board free ride.
Whales are avid of plankton, and Barnacles are filter-eaters that relish on this meal. This match made in heaven seems totally logical, the whale in all its grandeur is able to carry up to 500Kgs of barnacles on its skin without batting an eyelid, the plankton in return, occasionally offers a layer of protection of some sort in times of conflict, and acts as the first line of defense for incoming blows.

Whale Covered in Barnacles

Scientists define the relationship as Obligate Commensalism, neither Symbiosis where both organism benefit, neither Parasitism where one specie benefits at the expense of another.
This is mainly because the whale is rarely harmed (except by some drag and an occasional infection) and the barnacle is always taken into feeding territory by its host where it lives happily basking in its own irrelevance. It is worth mentioning that barnacles species are picky about the whale species they associate with and never cross from one specie to another (trust me I googled it).
When a barnacle is detached from a whale, it will often undergo necrosis and die, which is a key point in the analogy I am getting to.

Let's say Whales are the big investors, the capital holders, the cigar-wielding, yacht-owning, panel-speaking faces we have been bombarded with day after day, under the guise of "Making Lebanon Great Again" through Entrepreneurship (yeah yeah yeah) and all the smoke and mirrors that come with this hype. If so, then those of you with trained eyes will have probably noticed the barnacles that are always stuck on the skin of those whales.  The brisk-applauding, elbow-rubbing, hyper-dynamic, porte-paroling minions that always tell you what you need to do to succeed.

While human barnacles share the lack of backbone with their crustacean namesakes, they often stand-out in their unique capacity to detach from their current host and navigate spontaneously into a new one that promises to drive them into Paradise City. where the plankton is green and the sums are pretty...big.

"So what's your point?" I hear you ask already with the arrogant stance of a Lebanese who has been told that their mom's Tabbouleh is not that tasty.
I am not sure what my point is really. Perhaps I just love cetaceans and maybe I do agree with what you're thinking: "No, we cannot all be whales".
That is indeed often a unique genetically-bound situation, but you don't have to be a barnacle either!
If you think about it, after all, there are plenty of fish in the sea...

GroupThink: It's Not You, It's Them!

Original Photo by David Pacey

I dare you, I double dare you...(no, not to "say What one more time") but to say that you were never coerced into agreeing with a decision that a group of friends or coworkers came up with, in spite of your reticence, just out of desire to fit in.

In these times where work ethics, and personal relationships have grown into a mushy pile of political correctness, touchy-feely soul-crunching-heart-wrenching "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" emotional sensitivity, the biggest victim to  such practices has been undoubtedly critical thinking.

A critical thinker in any entity or group is the thorn in the side of the applauding masses. In the quest for cohesiveness among groups in meetings, in decision making processes, or most business processes, people have simply chosen the easy way out by choosing to agree with the majority and shunning any disagreeing opinion as just not the right fit to the group, or the weird one, or the annoying one.

Those of you who are fans of classical movies can recognize this pattern of behavior in the iconic "12 Angry Men", where Henry Fonda's character raises the ire of his co-jurors for disagreeing with a fast"guilty" verdict which could cost a man his life. I highly recommend the film for its artistic value and for the takeaway it brings to this subject and will refrain from giving away any more details.

Located somewhere between Peer-Pressure and Dictatorship, GroupThink is defined as "a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome."

Interestingly enough, this opens up the door for unscrupulous manipulators who know their way around this phenomenon to position key players who would subscribe to their agenda and alter the collective consciousness of the others through passive intimidation.

So what happens exactly when, in a business context,  the primary goal of a group member becomes to achieve group satisfaction rather than to find a truly successful decision based on their own expertise and point of view?

Summary Illustration of GroupThink Dynamics

In a real life example from my various consultancy projects, someone in a position of power was systematically trying to introduce into their company, in various open vacancies, an array of people with whom he has personal ties. He had already a core team of "groupies" around him that bullied everyone else into signing up into their way of doing things (regardless of how correct or NOT it was).

The meetings I attended with these individuals were always plagued by the same pattern of behavior. The inner circle persons to this influential individual would always advance an idea or an agenda or a solution and the rest would systematically fall in line. While there might have been some debate and [constructive] discussions at first, as more groupies were added to the team, the dissenting opinions were less outspoken and tended to agree faster with all the nonsense advanced by the others.

Naturally, the quality of work suffered and was obvious in several key opportunities being lost. To an external observer this was an inescapable truth but to the applauding masses, everything was just peachy.

As these dynamics tend to destabilize work and create problems it's a must for oversight bodies and individuals such as the HR department, or a highly placed manager to detect such anomalies and introduce remedies that work aim to mitigate and eventually eliminate this tendency.

Dissenting opinions are not troublesome, they are a healthy to critical thinking, managers should be always willing to listen to these opinions regardless of who is advancing them. Even someone who is being negative because they are unhappy can bring about important wake-up calls to the sleep-walking corporate environment.
An idea would be to assign always in each project a devil's advocate whose job would be to poke holes at the presented idea. Such divergent thinking when incorporated into the companies processes and procedures allows for early trouble-shooting and anticipatory measures rather than after-the-fact fire-fighting.

So, if you occasionally [often] feel you are a nuisance to colleagues who all seems to flow in unique harmony [think The Blue Danube - 1939 MGM Cartoon ] simply because you present a different point of view, keep your chin up,  it's probably not you, it's them!

The Worst 5 Types of Freelancers in a Kinder Surprise

"A freelancer, a freelancer, my business for a freelancer"
- Some Business Owner III

Such is the battle-cry of many business owners that operate in the realm of digital.

Any business is bound to find itself at some time in need of additional talent to serve its customer base or ongoing projects. Unfortunately, we live in an era of recession and one cannot always justify the overhead that comes along with acquiring good talent, let alone training them and retaining them as part of the business.

While common sense and ancient wisdom might teach us that true champions appear when things are most difficult, this blog is not about an inspirational story of hope and victory of hardship. This post is about those freelancers that we hire to come to our rescue, only to wish later we had succumbed to our misery.
There is a certain consolation in failure when the alternative involves another flavor of failure garnished with a side dish of having one's intelligence insulted.

Here are my top 5 nominees for freelancers archetypes to avoid:

1. The Time Traveler:
   The time traveler freelancer possesses great powers that allow them to take on a huge number of projects at once. Like the iconic Terminator sentence: "I'll be Back" they are often heard uttering the sentence: "You'll have it on time". By warping the time-space continuum, they can deliver flawless work on short deadlines, while juggling their personal and professional life at once. Of course all of this happens in their own mind and in reality you the business owner are left 2 heartbeats away from a stroke.
    
2. The Bipolar
   In psychology the bipolar is often illustrated as someone that can go from being very happy to very depressed very fast. Like in psychology, in freelancing The Bipolar is a very delicate type to handle.They can go very quickly from calling you and begging for work "because I really have a lot to pay this month" to walking out on a project after having started it "I really should stop taking such projects". Scientists are still baffled by this but my building janitor explained it in a few words: "maybe he doesn't have a lot to pay anymore"
     
3. The Lazy Daisy
   Like the cake with the same name this freelancer is usually rather sweet and like the flower, very delicate, but also like any other lazy person out there, utterly useless. You criticize their work and they will not object, you email them your grievances and they reply back acknowledging that, and always gently and nicely without breaking a sweat or in Layman's terms without giving a damn. Nothing can come out of collaborating with such a person who is surely as useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle.
     
4. The Crystal Swan
   This freelancer always needs to be in the spotlight to look their best. They excel at first impressions by highlighting every possible angle to their advantage so they can blind you with the reflection of their awesomeness. Take them away from the pedestal they set themselves on and all they are is fragile pieces of glass that cannot handle pressure and have little value beyond being ornamental. That bird won't fly in the business world and just costs too much to do nothing.
   
   
5. The Handyman
   The handyman freelancer can help you with just about anything. They can develop websites and app, do your accounting, bring you sales leads, advise on what type of surveillance cameras to install, throw some stock exchange tips your way, do a 5 years product roll-out strategy and even fix your Nespresso machine*. But when push comes to shove, this is the last person you want to resort to because as much as patchwork may be trendy in the textile industry, it's not how you want important work done.
   *I threw this last one in just in case they notice me and have another useless artifact they want bloggers to write about in exchange for some freebies).
   

If you are wondering how you can avoid falling on one of these 5 types, I am afraid there is no easy way around it. Like the rest of us, you will have to go through the process of hiring, failing and learning.
Think of it like buying a Kinder Egg, you never know what's the gimmick inside but you are always certain you are going to be excited at first, you are going to waste some time putting it together and you are likely to do this again even if the result is disappointing.

The Secret Code of the Web Designer

Design...The ultimate frontier crossed by the mind as it materializes abstract thoughts, desires and passions into the visual realm. Our entire daily existence bathes in design. From the shape of leaves on a tree to the ripples on the face of a water puddle, native designs are omnipresent in our surroundings. (Wo)Man-made designs are however a whole different ball game.
We idolize people who can convert thought into shape and stand in awe in front of their skill, and rightfully so. Just imagine Apple products without the design hype that comes with them or a slick Audi being reduced to a metal box and four wheels.
The Web is no different in this aspect. Things have come a long way from the very first hypertext markup lines ever written on a screen, . The Web has moved on from being a geekspace to become a commodity, and like any commodity it requires refining and packaging to better sell its contents.

It was out of this shift in paradigm that a new breed of intrepid warriors emerged: Wielding nothing but a 21" Macbook and a 5 button mouse, the valiant warrior broke through the multitude of lines of code that programmers had erected to keep the average Joe (and Jane) clueless and afraid from the wwworld behind the screen.
With great responsibility also came great show off. Over-interpreting every splash of color and setting the value for a day's work well beyond the entire budget of the project were a necessary evil intended to make the barbaric hordes of non-designers understand how big was the favor they were receiving by getting a web designer to accept their project.

But there is also order in the chaos; Much like the ancient Samurai, Web Designers live by a set of rules only known to them. The Code of the Web Designer is only passed from one generation to another in a secret ceremony shrouded by mystery, Pringles, scarves, Nutella and chants in old Elvish languages that consist mostly of rants on how web developers make their lives so miserable and really, really " just don't get it".

Behold the Secret Code of the Web Designer:

1. The Web is what you see in the browser. There is no relation between a website's layout and its HTML code.
2. Because of that,Web Designers do not feel the need to learn HTML, it's the developer's job
3. Web Designers do not slice any of their designs, because they do not know HTML. What are the web developers doing anyway?
4. Web Designers think that CSS stands for Cute, Sweet & Simple.
5. Web Designers do not consult with web developers before suggesting page animations or interactive features. If they can imagine it, then the developer should be able to find a way to do it.
6. Web Designers can only produce one viable, acceptable layout worth implementing per client.
7. Any additional layout that the Web Designer is forced to create for that same client, will be as ugly, hideous and repelling as possible, in a way to make the original design seem like a Da Vinci masterpiece.
8. Web Designers address design and functionality related bugs and mistakes with: "The developers did not execute it the way I asked them to"
9. Web Designers charge based on the Sting Fiscal System. The Sting fiscal system is based on Sting's mega hit "Every Breath You Take". 
10. Web Designers payment terms are usually 50% down payment upon commissioning the project and 50% before the client approves the final design.

However, luckily for us, not everybody lives by the code. The Ronins of the Web Designer tribes still offer consolation and hope, mostly by not having an attitude and then some more by simply learning the craft which they choose to be associated with and then doing it well. Alas much like the Ronins, these web designers never stay in one place for too long and often move on where they can do what they like away from all the hype.

Below is a recently discovered haiku describing the web designer...cherish it!

Web Designers splash

colors like having a rash

take a lot of cash

---

The Haiku of the Web Designer 

The 7 Odd Types of LinkedIn Contacts

Ever since the dot-com boom in the last century, people have sought out to enhance their business presence by using online mediums. It comes to no surprise to anyone, with the emergence of Social Media  as a defacto medium of human communication a few years ago, that the torch would be handed-on to this new age channel. LinkedIn came to be during this gold rush, immediately sweeping away the competition for an array of reasons that, unfortunately, I am not about to cover in this piece.
As popularity of this social channel grew, in came pouring the tutorials and lessons on how to best tailor your profile for maximum exposure by all the wannabe self-proclaimed gurus of the social web.This is not one of those.
Instead I propose to lead you with me on a discovery mission of the 7 odd types of people that usually will add you as a contact along with their modus operandi.

1. The Hoarder:
   
   
   a.k.a the collector is someone who goes around on LinkedIn adding random people to his contacts or accepting every single contact request they receive. They never bother to introduce themselves or explain why they are adding you. A dead-giveaway is that they have always "indicated you are a friend". A more sophisticated breed of collectors call themselves LIONs (Background music: Katy Perry's Roar) which stands for LinkedIn Open Networker. Recognizable by the OpenLink icon, they justify in a million and one ways why they need to have 5000 contacts and how they are actually creating synergy from this.
    
2. The Student: 
   The student usually seeks out managers, CEOs and HR people to connect to. Their profile is normally too empty (no shame in that) and they try way too hard to fill it in with tiny summer jobs, irrelevant random experiences and every single project they ever completed during their study years. I have no idea why, but I kept having images of baby seals while I was writing these last two sentences.

   

   Original Image Credits

   
   
3. The Recruiter:
   These people exist on a different level of awareness. They are the modern day online equivalent of the early hunters who just happen to also be gatherers. They seek out the keywords they badly need to fill that vacant job. It doesn't matter if your profile had those keywords in a job you occupied over 8 years ago, they'll still roll the dice on you. Who knows, maybe you are up for it?
   Their hidden superpower resides in the fact that they can go through your list of contacts faster than a pyramid scheme would part a fool from his money.
   
   

   

   A classical recruiter approach aimed at
   rummaging through one's contacts

   
    
4. The Bimbo (applies to female or males equally)
   I tried really hard to use a more imaginative wording, such as "Photogenically Centered Person", "Wardrobe Challenged Individual" but the truth of the matter remains that these upstanding members of society prefer to prance around in skimpy clothing on their LinkedIn profile throwing out of the windows any professional credibility their credentials might have. I am sorry, but unless you are setting up your account in order to find specific opportunities in that area of expertise, I won't give you the time of day when you add me on LinkedIn even if you work in a Telecom or Financial Company.
   
   

   

   Sorry to disappoint you boys and gals
   I know you were waiting for the pic

         
5. The Fake Profile
   If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck (and thanks to Instagram  makes a face like a duck) it's probably a duck. Fake profiles are often easy to spot. Stock images used for profile pictures, filled with pre-canned catch phrases for describing some experiences and usually pushing identical updates to some other profiles out there. Here's a news flash for you, there is something called Google Image search, your stock photo is not gonna fly here nor will your "big clumsy model hands" (see picture)
   
   

   

   An example of Fake Profile using a model's picture
   off the internet (read upwards)

     
6. The Offshore IT Sales Pitch Person
   These LinkedIn members usually share a, more or less identical, geographical area very rich in IT (or Telecom) talents and skills. It is enough to accept one person as a contact and you will receive dozens of identical people adding you and offering up their offshore services. Sure, I run a business that requires IT services, and there's nothing I would enjoy more than discovering new ways to reduce expenses but this is just plain ridiculous. The cost of the man-hours spent fending off these contact requests outweighs any savings than I might stand to do.

   

   One of many similar pitch emails.
   Approve one and you'll get flooded

7. The Clueless
   This person has no idea how and why they are on LinkedIn. They think it's another Facebook. They might post inappropriate content. They lock-down their profile to the extreme or don't even bother completing it properly. They will add people for all the wrong reasons and for no reasons at all. They never reply to messages and often end up creating duplicate and triplicate accounts then adding you all over again (the concept of retrieve password is still alien to them).
   
   
   

I am sure you could perhaps find additional odd types, other sub-groups, or even totally disagree with the profiling I have done; but what remains certain, is that LinkedIn is here to stay and with it the vast universe of business connections. So set your own rules and policies on whom to connect to and whom to ignore, on what approaches you welcome and what makes you lose interest. Use all this to build quality relationships that put you in touch with people that complement and complete your business micro-cosmos and put in continuous expansion and harmony. Don't be a tool...use one, in this case LinkedIn!

Pay Up Or Shut Up

I challenge you all!

Yes, I dare you to produce a business owner or manager in Lebanon, that does not consistently complain about cash liquidity, bad paying customers, and the endless list of excuses that these customers are able to come up with to simply avoid settling their dues.

Not paying on time (or even at all) has become a national sport to the point where one may suggest it even deserves its own federation.

Think about it:
The Federation of Accounts Outstanding.
It has a ring to it, a "je ne sais quoi" of a financial version of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" only more sordid. I am also even sure we would be entitled to follow on TV the never-ending politically motivated squabbles when they decide to elect their board *cough*FLB*cough*.

Although a handful of businesses still maintain a healthy reputation for settling their dues, a mix of a degrading economical situation, lack of swift actions by the judicial system, and a very individualistic non-team-playing pop culture has made this a trademark of today's Lebanese business scene.

This quote by the very talented Ted Danson's character Dr John Becker from the comedy sitcom Becker illustrate our predicament in this country:" That's the problem with the world, everybody says "Everybody does it," so everybody does it!"

I am assuming that there are enough scientific studies to prove that if everybody did pay their dues, everyone would end up with more money to spare eventually. "Money begets money" as the proverb goes ( I will refrain from using the second half of the Lebanese version of the proverb goes)

Anyway, what better way to illustrate this other than by giving you examples of the ingenious payment-evasive skills of your average Lebanese business owner:

Location Based/ Absence Related Excuses:

• The CEO/CFO/Accountant  is out of office/town/country/universe (sick, leave, divorce, marriage...etc)
• Your account manager is on maternity leave; she was handling your papers
• I am talking to you while roaming. I will sign the check once I am back in Lebanon.
• I am back in Lebanon, but I did not go to the office yet.
• I am not currently at my desk. Call me again tomorrow.

Misplacement Of Items

• We cannot find your invoice, please send us a copy again.
• We cannot find the checkbook (variant: The checkbook is finished, we need to get a new one)
• We cannot find the signed check. We will have to issue a new one.

Administrative Delays

• The management did not yet approve the payment (no reasons given)
• The check is being prepared (I can never tell if they are actually designing & printing the check or if they have someone who writes r.e.a.a.a.a.a.a.l.l.y slow)
• The check has been signed by one person, we are waiting for the second signature.
• The check has been signed, but I am not authorized to hand it to you yet.
• The check is in the safe. The manager has the combination and is not here today.
• I am too busy right now, I cannot verify if the check has been made out (usually comes with multiple mouse click sounds associated with minesweeper or solitaire)
• The check is issued by the main office outside Lebanon. We need to send them an email reminder for them to mail it in to us.
• We just implemented a new policy that dictates that payment is done 45 days after the invoice. Yes, the policy was not in place when you invoiced us, but we have to implement it now.

The list can go on and on, with a multitude of variants on these all-too-blatant basic excuses, but at the center of the matter lies a much bigger malaise. We take everything for granted: Our parents, our children, our friends, our loved one(s) and eventually our business contacts. The way we do business reflects who we are as a society: self-centered, distrustful, short-sighted, ego-bloated and eventually tragicomical. 

Long live the Joie de Vivre!

The Hypentrepreneur

For the past 3 to 5 years, all I hear has revolved around the buzz on how great it is to be an entrepreneur. Local and international publications have been blowing the horn of entrepreneurship loud enough to bring down the walls of Jericho.

Inside the mind of the Hypentrepreneur

The amount of buzz words related to this has grown so out of proportion that it induces immediate unpleasant physical side-effects when I hear any of them.

Here, try it yourself, repeat these words out-loud until you become lightheaded or nauseous:

Incubator, accelerator, seeding, investor, angel ,crowd-funding, gamification, freemium, IPO, Private Beta, Gen-Z...

not enough? Add some tech-jargon:

Framework, Bootstrap, CSS3, HTML5, jQuery, bootloader, jailbreak..




The Lebanese market has been taken by storm by what I lovingly refer to as Entrepreneurship Mongers who take the art of portraying a rosy picture of what this life offers to new limits. This however is not entirely by their own merit but quite possibly made easier by the following notorious native Lebanese character traits:

1. Individualism: We are not, have never been, and never will be team players. The few successful collaborations by groups of Lebanese are just the exception that proves the rule. There's always a catch when something is happening too smoothly within a team or a business. The pumped-up form of the one-man-show would be the one-family-show. I won't even address how bad we function as a society.
2. Easy Money: A common local proverb, used to portray how profit-oriented a person is, roughly translates to: "He would sell his own father"; Pay attention: not "betray"...literally "sell". Why? Because we are always seeking the proverbial quick-buck, the shortcut to making as much money right here, right now regardless of ethics or moral values.
3. Over-inflated Ego : Not to be confused with point (1), this only complements it by means of attitude, show-off, fancy titles or use of pompous words. It also involves not returning calls or emails and posing with local celebrities even if you begged them to take a picture with you.

With the exponential rise in popularity of digital media and all the "shabang" that goes with it, it was only a matter of time before almost everybody you meet ended up wearing thick plastic-framed glasses, the tech equivalent of "bling", and calling themselves Geeks.

So, like Chef Antoine and Teta Latife would say in their cooking shows, let me repeat the ingredients:

Equal measures of ego, individualism and thirst for profit, well mixed with easily impressed young minds, bolstered by greed of sponsors/investors/Skimmers-on-the-side. Well stirred in an incubator or an accelerator and served chilled with a side dish of arrogance,

The perfect recipe for everybody's latest and trendiest cocktail: The Hypentrepreneur.

Some qualities of the Hypentrepreneur:

• The Hypentrepreneur knows best!
• The Hypentrepreneur does not need a job before going entrepreneurial, it's in their blood because they are...yes you guessed it...Lebanese.
• The Hypentrepreneur only pretends to work at other companies because they are smarter than everybody there combined.
• The Hypentrepreneur begs for freelance gigs as long as he or she needs the extra cash and drops the project half way through when funding comes through. (Or after they buy those Beats headphone they wanted so bad)
• The Hypentrepreneur sucks up to the owners of the incubators or shared workspace facilities. It's not called sucking up, it's networking.
• The Hypentrepreneur follows the rules of Doing Business in Lebanon but never admits it.
• The Hypentrepreneur is always short on money but lives at home with the parents where breakfast is served in bed by a foreign domestic worker in the morning and where mom lays out nicely their outfit for hanging out at many of the overpriced night clubbing venues in the evening.

The Hypentrepreneur is like the thin crust of dirt that covers a beautiful piece of silverware and that needs that special cleaning liquid to be rubbed off. Once out of the way, you can admire the beautiful true craftsmanship done by many people for whom I have the utmost respect. To those people I reserve the right to be called entrepreneurs and to them I say carry on like I have repeatedly expressed in private conversations.

What our young tribal, confused society needs is more discipline, more streamlining (see I can use buzzwords too). By portraying to people (youngsters mostly) that having a regular paying job, a career of some sorts, in places where rules and systems are well set, we are simply setting ourselves up for a bigger disappointment.

Entrepreneurship is cool, when it works, for that tiny percentile! For everybody else, things won't come that easy and it will involve taking the long road to success and learning along the way to respect experience, value opinions, assume responsibility, accept consequences and emerge much more polished than that raw material you were when you thought your were an Entrepreneur.
So, for a change and for whatever my advice is worth: Get a life...Get a Job!

Business in Lebanon Infographic

Business in Lebanon by Patrick Chemali
Inititally Posted on March 6th 2013 on Facebook

If you were to ask me now, I probably would not be able to pinpoint the exact event that prompted me back on March 6th, 2013 to create this infographic.

I promise you, it is not due to the fact that I suffer from a poor memory, but rather to the onslaught of a multitude of incidents that any of which could qualify as the trigger.

Doing business in Lebanon works...in mysterious ways. So I discovered after my transition from the corporate to the retail world.
In spite of a fruitful year in 2012 running a very young startup (Sharp Lemon), I was continuously frustrated by practices that often plague the daily business scene in Lebanon.
Some might argue that I am not adapted for the big challenges that such a dynamic over-crowded marketplace poses. I agree! I only know how to sell straight!

This does not make the contents in my infographic less true. Of course I did over-simplify it, made it more though provoking (some say provocative) but I have never been one to gently cuddle the ego of the masses.

All businesses suffer from what I highlighted above. Some survive in-spite of such practices, others by using these very practices and following it up with "Hayda Lebnen" (i.e. This is Lebanon) as part of a one-size-fits-all justification.

It's worth mentioning that the infographic recently stirred some people up when I reposted it on twitter and my good friend Tarek dedicated a post to it on his hugely popular Beirut/NTSC blog.

Some accused me of useless bashing, of degrading our image as Lebanese in the eyes of the world.
I am not sure if they did it out of their enthusiasm, youth and love of the country or if, perhaps, it struck a chord making it too close for comfort. To each his own...meanwhile this remains my point of view!