This is a country where the concept of “self-service” is an ugly rumor from overseas.

Generally, anyone with money here … expects someone else to pick up after them, clean their home, wash their cars, raise their children and, most certainly, pump their gas.

It may make for an very interesting social experiment, then, when 10 Enoc gas stations in Dubai go to self-service gas-pumping during the wee hours of the night, beginning in July.

A couple of examples of the local lack of initiative, when it comes to potentially unpleasant tasks.

–Numerous coffee shops that border on streets routinely have massive SUVs idling two or three deep, waiting for baristas to bring their coffee. To them. While they sit inside their air-conditioned beasts. Never getting out because that might require parking; it might require standing in line; it might require walking.

–Popular restaurants? Same thing. At Lebanese Flower, one of the more popular restaurants in Abu Dhabi, a significant portion of the staff is assigned to running out to the street to take orders from guys in cars. They get the attention of staff by pulling up and leaning on the horn. Yes, it detracts a bit from dining al fresco during the winter months.

And gas stations? You drive up, and a band of little guys from Bangladesh or the Philippines are waiting for you. People crack the windows of their cars, mention how much gas they want … and never leave their cars.

Now? They will have to get out of their cars (how tedious!), and walk around their cars until they discover where it is the gas goes in … and we all hope someone doesn’t try to pump it up the exhaust pipe, for example … and grapple with the real possibility that it will be seriously hot and they could get sweaty. And might even get the smell of gas on their hands.

And, of course, it will involve trips into the office to ask for the gas to be unlocked, and then to pay for it.

I mean, really. This is going to be a problem. I expect complaints to the people at Enoc, and a lot of people in the other emirates looking with concern at Dubai, and hoping this barbarous practice does not bleed over to their own neighborhoods.