Check your voter registration

Courtesy of iDip, here are the links to use to check if you're registered to vote in the upcoming elections or not (mainly for people who are out of town and might be concerned, like I was). This is great - I must say I am impressed with the Ministry of Interior. It's impressive for any of our ministries to go automated, let alone so soon after elections have been called!

Men
Women

See, this proves that when Kuwait wants to, it can be efficient. It's the same reaction I had when I first walked into the new Social Security building in Kuwait City last year. The institution was always quite organized, but in the new building it actually feels like a private sector office building, not a public sector service building. You actually have smiling, happy employees, people waiting patiently for their number to be called, an abundance of service terminals, a no smoking policy, ample parking, proper security, and managers who actually go to work everyday. It all depends on who's in charge, but if a government office or ministry wants to be efficient in Kuwait, it can. I know that the fact that every Kuwaiti is guaranteed a job in the government sector puts a strain on the country and produces an overly saturated bureaucracy, but I'm starting to feel like that's a poor excuse for stagnation. It's a pitiful place to be where the more employees you have, the less efficient you become. It should be the opposite. The more employees you have, the quicker each person should be out of there when trying to get a simple procedure done. All it needs is a good leader with good organizational and management skills, and every ministry in Kuwait could be like the Social Security office. Then again, hopefully now that we've started having female ministers things will start to change. I had a meeting with Dr. Masouma al-Mubarak (Kuwait's first female minister, Minister of Planning) in January and she showed up at 7:30am on the dot. I don't think most male ministers would have been on time that early in the morning.

There is my spontaneous rant for the day. Anyway, thank you iDip for the link. Enjoy finding your names online all - I must admit it's a bit thrilling when you see your name and information come up. I cynically thought that it wasn't going to work once I hit enter.