Blowing the bills Skype-high

Arab life What is dangerous about Skype is that it gives you the impression that you are in touch.

There is something dangerous about Skype. I never thought I would be using it quite so frequently. Yet here I am, broke and in debt to the credit card company, on a pay-as-you-go phone plan which, after rent, has actually made up the bulk of my expenses in Abu Dhabi, and with the microphone plugged into my tiny Egyptian-assembled laptop, the uniquely shaped, KLM-blue icon beckons. Once again, I double click.

What is dangerous about Skype is that it gives you the impression that you are in touch. To an even greater extent than the regular phone, with which you are always careful no matter what, Skype creates the illusion of contact with home in a situation completely devoid of day-to-day entanglements there. Why should you spend so much time thinking about just such entanglements? It is, of course, free - unless you SkypeOut (and, in the light of my own disappointments with getting through, let alone the quality of the experience once I manage it, I really do not recommend you SkypeOut). So you do it often, far more often than you use the phone, and for far longer periods of time.

After a while it feels as if you live in two places at once. Given the time differences and the fact that it cannot be used in the office - no, if you don't plan on getting fired, it really cannot be used in the office - Skype will also often keep you up all night. Especially at a weekend, but often also during the week, others will start their day at the office with similarly zombie-like expressions, just as tired as I am, but I just know that it is not for the same reason. How often have I felt compelled to explain that, no, I was not actually out painting the town red, but simply Skyping all night? It is terribly embarrassing.

Potentially maddening, too: you are thinking about the wrong things, tired for the wrong reasons, unhealthily attached to your laptop; and it all takes away from what you have to offer your immediate surroundings in the way of attention, energy and, well, social grace. Half of you - in some ways, indeed, the half that matters - is otherwise engaged, permanently, and there is a sense in which it should be freed up for the life you are living here now.

But the more you use Skype, all things considered, the more it becomes irresistible.