Mood-Elevating at the Attaba Parking Garage

Alternate title:

Attaboy, Attaba!

When you’re driving up its entrance ramp, the parking garage in Attaba neighborhood, Cairo, looks just like our sanitized parking structures in Minnesota, if you overlook that the floor is rippled.  There are no lights.  Parking attendants wander the levels, emerging like drowsy elves, available to provide information that would otherwise be posted on a sign, of which there are nearly none.  Another example of how Egypt soaks up some of its massive unemployment by creating jobs where they are not absolutely necessary – by de-automating, by resisting or subverting the march of mechanization.  Like at Geneina Mall, where the weight-and-biorhythm machine has a human attendant beside it to take your bill and, after smoothing it out, insert it into the slot for you.

There are many prime spots denied to the public, a ratty rope indicating these are to be reserved for some unknown elite. But such frustrations are common to the American parking garage, as well.

No, what makes the Attaba parking garage special is the elevator, or rather what’s in it. The elevator operator has made himself quite at home, you see:

If you’re going to subvert the automation of elevators, you might as well do it with pizzazz.  

Mohammed Abdel Sabbour has swathed the interior with strings of artificial flower buds and flashing lights, sachets of berry scent, stickers, doodads, tiny hanging pottery and pocket-size stuffed animals.  A Sanyo car stereo, bolted to a rack in a corner of the ceiling to the right of the door, plays a tape of a capella Muslim prayer music.  It’s all tricked out in the kitschy manner that many Egyptian taxi drivers apply to their dashboards and rear windows.

Why? “I spend 16 hours a day here,” Mohammed said.  He’d get bored without it.  With it, he’s pretty irrepressibly cheery for a guy who passes his Dickensianly long workday trapped in a box.  I watched people come out of his elevator, and they were all smiling.

There is a downside: Mohammed takes a lunch break.  You can hardly expect him to leave all of his doodads vulnerable to theft or destruction by unchaperoned elevator-riders.  So the elevator is out of service every day between noon and 1, when I returned from my first attempt to get my car registration renewed.  For the benefit of several onlookers loitering in the vicinity of the elevator, I began to make the point that an elevator is a machine and can run all day long, but when I saw how passively the onlookers accepted the shutdown, I cut short my rant.  

I realized I would have to walk up six flights carrying my toddler son.  The elevator ends on a floor of retail shops abutting a bus turnaround, and I was unsure of the layout.  Seeing a stairway, I asked an employee of a nearby shoeshop, “This goes to the garage?” He looked up at me with diffident courtesy and crisply gave the common form of confirmation, “Insha Allah” (if God wills).  That’s just how Muslims say that the hand of God trumps human plans across the board, but in the context, it seemed a little absurd.  Is God really going to re-route the stairs to arrive somewhere else?   Can we count on anything in this world?  Can I believe that the parking garage is still up there?

One more downside:  The elevator is turned off all day Sunday, which was the day I returned to the Cairo Traffic Office.  With a single onlooker sitting by, I made the point that machines don’t need a day off.  The guy shrugged, and noted it was by order of the idarra (district government).

Exiting the parking garage, we see the final way that the Attaba parking garage differs from the Target Center ramp.  Here, one hour’s worth of parking will cost you a pound and 10 piasters – at the current exchange rate, 19 cents.

 

–May 14, 2005