Liquor license sur-prizes

After going through all that trouble to get my liquor license -- from the salary certificate from my employer to driving in circles around the desert trying to find the bloody Khalifa City A Police Station -- I had the idea that it would at least be taken seriously by the liquor store people. And it is, at least its existence is. But all that nonsense about the monthly limit (some percentage of my salary, which seems to be arbitrarily calculated) is another story. Let me give you a little example:

There we are, at some liquor outlet (name deleted at suggestion of my husband the lawyer) in Khalidiyah (hey - I can write that in Arabic!) stocking up on a bit of wine and hard stuff. Ok, so we bought about four cases of wine. Or so. We went over to the checkout, I proudly handed over my liquor license, and...

I was over the monthly limit.

I don't know how much over I was -- probably about eight million dirhams or so, judging by the number of bottles we had in the cart -- I was too busy working out my apologetic idiot explanation to the clerk's expected "Sorry madame, you cannot buy this much hooch in one month. Now the liquor police are going to take you out to the desert late at night and beat you to a pulp for making such a stupid mistake."

But that's not what happened.

What the clerk actually said was this:

"Oh, madame! You have spent over X dirhams this month! To honour you and thank you for your patronage we are now going to give you a special prize! Would you like a free bottle of whisky or would you prefer a free case of beer?"

The whisky was shite, so we took the beer.