I just noticed what my local public television station is showing tonight: frontline: death of a princess: “It was perhaps the most controversial film in the history of public television — the story of a young Saudi princess who was publicly executed for committing adultery.” It wasn’t just controversial: it changed my life.
Back in 1979-1980, we were going through a tough patch financially. (Most people were – this was the era of “stagflation”.) I had a decent job at CMC, but I really needed something that paid a bit more. At that time most of the oil companies in the Middle East were starting to ramp up their IT and HPC activities, and the trade papers were full of advertisements for positions in Saudi Arabia. The typical deal was fairly complicated, but extremely lucrative. Contractors (male only) lived in company housing, were paid tax-free through numbered Swiss bank accounts, worked their tails off writing Fortran and PL/1, and got two 2-week vacations a year (either at home, or wherever the family wanted to holiday). The minimum contract was two years, with a nice bonus for extending. There wasn’t much to do except work, although I had an idea of getting a personal computer (a Commodore PET or similar) and doing some applications development.
I contacted one of the “body shops” that handled the contracts, went through all the interviews, and was accepted. I was perhaps a week away from giving my notice at CMC and fixing a travel date to Riyadh. And then the BBC showed Death of a princess. The next day (May 7, 1980), the agency called me to say that the Saudi government had broken off diplomatic relations with the UK and had frozen all visas for UK nationals; my contract was therefore cancelled. A few weeks later I saw an ad for a job in the USA… and the rest is history. But it could have been very different.