Book excerpt: This publication was compiled over the course of several months of interviews in Saudi Arabia after the COVID-19 outbreak. The pace of internal reform in the Kingdom has been significant over the past three-five years, and in many cases the old, low-tech, and sclerotic public service that had so long been a feature of Saudi Arabia was vastly changed when the pandemic arrived in Riyadh. Nonetheless, this virus has challenged the modernizing bureaucracy in the desert at a magnitude that no other event, be it war or reform, has even come close to doing.