INDEPENDENCE DAY

Today is July 4th, 2008, Independence Day, and I was fortunate enough to be able to take off today, and observe the holiday. I wanted to put the title of today's post in color, but was unable to accomplish it. Being here in a war zone has made me much more aware of Independence Day, and the meaning it has. I see the helicopters land and take off from the CSH (Combat Support Hospital), and try to will them to not be needed. I know when they are flying in and out, it is because someone has been injured severly enough to need immediate medical attention, and I try to will that not to happen. As Yoda, the Jedi Warrior from Star Wars says, "Do or not do, there is no try," but I don't want to accept that I am not doing the thing with willing no one gets hurt, so I continue trying, hoping I will succeed in my efforts. Who would have ever thought a phrase with so much meaning could come from a sci-fi movie? I know back home, every one is concerned about the high price of gasoline, the rising costs of food, clothing, and other things, but here, there are people that are sometimes dieing. Much of the time over here, we are concerned about whether the PX has what we want, or whether the airconditioning is going to continue to operate, or whether the DFAC (dining facility) will have watermelon or something else we like today, or how much work there is going to be today, but the bottom line we sometimes forget is there are soldiers who are going out, and putting themselves in harms way. Some of the bases over here get "hit" fairly often, and here where I am, we don't get "hit" very often, so it is easy to forget where we are. A properly operating mortar can travel six and a half kilometers, which is less distance than it is to town from here. I am posting this to remind myself to be thankful of what I have, and to ask everyone who reads it to please do the same. Thanks, GliderMike
Oh, it probably hit 120 degrees F outside today, like it has for the past couple of weeks every day.

Holiday

Today, I am celebrating Memorial Day. It has been 220 days since I left Houston, and yesterday was eight months since I left Salt Lake City. I had wanted to take last Saturday off, but I was the only fork lift driver at the post office, period. One of the other fork lift drivers was away doing a training class, and the other two were away on R&R. Yesterday evening, I was sitting on our small fork lift with three empty "cookie sheets" (a "cookie sheet" is about 8 feet by 10 feet, made of aluminum, and is used to load freight onto an airplane) looking at the back doors of the post office. I was wondering whether I could bust thru the doors, make a u-turn, and be out the front gate to "Outside" before anyone noticed, and how far I would be able to go. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered. I finally got off the fork lift, opened the doors, and took the cookie sheets to our warehouse lot. I went to my supervisor's office and asked if I could take my holiday tomorrow (on what is now today). The day was open, so here I am, off work for a day, for the first time since early January, if you don't count the move to Speicher as a partial day off.

I had told myself I would spend the day looking for a new job. So far, I slept too late to do breakfast, finished a short book I started two weeks ago, didn't get dressed til noon, had a nice leisurely lunch, and got current on my email. There will be new contracts taking effect in August for civilian jobs over here, and no one is telling whether any jobs are changing companies or not. The company has been putting out propaganda about going to work for other companies, recommending that people compare the benefits of working for the company against the benefits of other companies. Possible benefits of working for the company are paid entry visa, paid transportation home if you quit early, paid vacation with a paid travel allowance, and a few other things I don't remember. What they don't say is the possible benefits of working for another company are, being treated with dignity and respect (no guarantees there either), possible higher wages, possible better living conditions (not likely, really), and possibly working for a company that cares about the quality of service it renders. If anyone knows of any companies working over here, that try to hire a higher quality employee, someone who takes pride in their work, and is willing to go the extra mile to keep the customer happy, please let me know about them.

Another Day in Paradise

Thanks for the comment OB1. I emailed my snail mail address to you. If anyone wants to send snail mail to me, send me an email, and I will send you my mailing address. I've had to cut back on computer usage, and may only be checking email every 4 or 5 days, so please don't get in a hurry. The snail mail isn't as fast as email, but it is different. If I send a post card, it will be a unique creation, and while have a collectible stamp on it. I personally think the stamps and cards should be sold to raise $ for the US Hang Gliding Teams. You can send your donations to the respective teams. If you prefer to support the US Paragliding Teams, I can create custom stamps for Paragliding also! One of the good workers here is bailing. I accused him of being like a rat leaving a sinking ship and his response was "Guilty". He and his best friend are going to Thailand to either get a job with some other company who is doing contract work here in Iraq, or they are going to buy a bar in Thailand. I should have told him it is a lot more fun being a patron of a bar than it is to work in one. It's been 35 years since I worked in a bar, and I still don't need to do that again. If you own a bar, you work every night, with no days off. Spell checker is great. I get in a hurry typing, and do the dis-lexic thing with letters sometimes. With spell checker, all I have to worry about is grammatical errors! Half of the employees of the company don't use spell checker. Every time I see something generated by the company, there are spelling errors that spell checker would have caught. I don't know if I did the dis-lexic thing correctly, but I didn't like the option it gave me.

Camp Speicher Military Post Office

I did not realize I hadn't posted since I arrived here at Speicher. My how time flies when you're having fun! I arrived, along with three other people, here at Camp Speicher on January 25. Of the four of us, only one guy and myself remain. One person left after three days here. She had spent a year at the post office in the Green Zone, and was expecting something similar here. What she got was a small room with a room mate in the women's dorm, and what she was expecting was a room three times the size of the one she was in, along with a queen size bed, and no room mate. The other person that left either de-mobilized (de-mobed) or transferred, no one is sure which. The reason he might have been able to get a transfer is because the supervisor who was here when I arrived was a bigot. Were it not for the fact the previous supervisor was a bigot, the guy should have been sent home. When he left, I noticed no change in my work load. Another girl was sent to Baghdad, because she was fraternizing with the client. Another girl found a job with another company over here. We had another guy that went home three days ago. The last girl that left sorted letters, which is what I am doing. If she had been a good worker, my workload would have doubled. It didn't. The last guy that left made no change in my workload when he left. There is one more for sure, and possibly another guy that needs to leave. If the one leaves, the other one might become a worthwhile individual, but I sort of doubt it. As it is, the post office has two less people working here now, than they had before I arrived. The post office was short staffed before I arrived here. Such is the company. I have decided I won't do R&R, as I am having so much fun here, if I leave, I may never come back, so we will see how long I can hold out without a vacation. I think next available day off is some time in April, then one in August. When I get eight sick days built up, I will start taking one sick day every month, and that may help. We can accumulate up to eight sick days, then we lose what we don't use. Right now, I have four available, and April first, I will have five available. At least here at Speicher, it is a five minute walk to everywhere I need to go, which beats the thirty minute bus ride each direction every day . Well, that is about all I can think of to say for now.

Will that be chicken or pasta?

It has been rather hectic here at HangGlide Baghdad Central lately. I work at the JMMT, which is the Joint Military Mail Terminal, not to be confused with a regular post office. The area where I work receives mail for all the Coalition Forces units based in Baghdad, and hands mail to the units when they do mail call on a daily basis. Yesterday, during the peak period, two of us, handed mail to 40 units. Some of the units got a lot of package mail, and some didn't. The packages are sorted, and then placed into "tri-walls". A tri-wall is a cardboard box open at the top, and about 3 feet deep. It sits on a 42" x 48" pallet. Now that the Christmas crunch is over, most of the units only get one tri-wall each day of packages. There are a few that still get multiples, as many as ten tri-walls on any given day. It doesn't sound like it should be a big deal to pick up a tri-wall of mail and hand it off to someone, until you do it for a few days. I've lost about an inch around my waistline in the last month from doing this job.

When I arrived here, we had 3 pallet jacks, and need eight, and had about a third of the staff we needed. We were about 5 days behind on getting the mail sorted and out to the units. The previous supervisor, and several of his foremen had been relieved of their duties (forced to make a choice between chicken or pasta), because they had not seen the Christmas rush coming, and the company was trying to play catch up. The trucking division was at 125% on staff levels, and the mail was at about 35%, so the new supervisors offered to take some of the excess truck drivers. They were also able to commandeer warm bodies from other job sites, not related to mail service, and put them in the mail. The military offered to assist to help us get caught up, and management resisted taking the help, until we were no longer losing ground. When we started making headway, they finally got us some more pallet jacks. When we finally got caught up, management decided to make us do box lunches at the job site to cut down on the time we were away for lunch. Each box consisted of a sandwich with 2 deli style (thin) slices of meat with one slice of cheese. Most of us would take 2 boxes, and make 1 sandwich, throwing the extra bread away. There was a lot of grumbling and complaining, and talk of quitting over the box lunches, but no one quit, which surprised me.

I saw it as a "Chicken or Pasta" push, and still believe that is what it was. If you aren't sure of what I am talking about with the "Will be chicken or pasta" question, think about what the airlines serve for meals on the longer flights. I talked to one of the main supervisors about the whole deal, and she didn't deny that it was a chicken or pasta push. I asked her how high up the person was who made the box lunch decision, and she said the person was pretty close to the top. I started watching the people who were complaining the loudest, and came to the realization that if most of the whiners left, my workload would not appreciably increase. There were one or two that could leave and actually decrease my workload by their leaving. I discussed this new supposition with her, and she commented that I was a little slow about noticing things. She worked several days helping sort mail, in addition to her regular duties to see what was going on. During the time I have been involved with the company, I have seen this dog and pony show in varying forms before. When they are overstaffed, they start with a lot of bull s*&%t to get people to quit. There was one supervisor (2 years ago) who took us all down to where the trucks were parked, after hearing a lot of grumbling (about signing paperwork every day) and told all the drivers "If you don't like it, and don't want to sign these same forms every day, I'll buy you a f*&%$#g foot locker and have you on an airplane this afternoon." My theory is management now realized we were now overstaffed, and some personnel needed to be eliminated, so they started the box lunch deal. I think they were afraid to start the box lunch deal until we were caught up. They started bringing in office staff from other sites here in Baghdad to fill in gaps left from transferring people out to other jobs, partly to see what the fall out on the service would be.

Within the last week, they caught one of the employees with alcohol, and stolen property. In case you weren't aware, the possession of alcohol or pornography by anyone in the US military, or anyone who is a contractor with the US military, are both prohibited items (among other things) in Iraq, by the agreement between the US military and the Iraqi government. He had stuff in his possession that had been reported stolen by his room mate, in addition to some alcohol. He was sent home. The managers decided to do a search of everyone's quarters for contraband, and ended up with somewhere between ten and twenty per cent of the total staff getting a choice of chicken or pasta. There were a few that voluntarily made the choice before they got busted, but most left at the request of management.

This opened up some of the housing options, and several of us living in one of the two 12 person tents or in the bus station (Yeah, it really used to be the bus transportation office), which also sleeps about twelve were given the option of moving into a "hooch". Most who were in the bus station opted for the hooch, but many of us in the tents, said "I don't think so". In the tent, I have about thirty two square feet that I do not have to share. The hooch that was offered to me would have reduced my "personal" space to about 16 square feet, which would have been my bed, and half of a closet half the size of the one I have to myself. I would have had to keep my suitcase and footlocker under my bed, and lived out of them, instead of being able to hang my clothes up, and keep my socks and underwear on a shelf in a cabinet. Because of the layout of the hooch (door at one end and bathroom on the other end), I would not have been able to put a rug down, without the room mate having to walk on it. No big problem, unless you are next to the door, and it starts raining, or if you are next to the bathroom, and the shower puts a lot of water on the floor, and gets your stuff wet. Neither choice seemed like a good idea to me. The guy who is the evening housing person, was talking like I had no choice, but to move into the hooch. If I still had to get up in the night to go the the bathroom a lot, it might have been worth it to have a bathroom in my quarters. I came very close to asking for the pasta, or maybe a salad. (I don't eat much chicken, as I have been to 2 or 3 too many chicken plants in the trucking industry.)

I'm taking my New Year's day holiday today, and enjoying the time off. I slept in until 5 am, instead of getting up at 3:45 am like I usually do. I walked to breakfast, and sat down at a table to eat, inside a building with lights turned on. Doesn't sound like a big deal until you consider the normal deal is hurry thru the breakfast line to get my stuff in a "go" plate, hurry back to the bus, and eat in the dark with the plate on my lap on the bus as it bounces along. Several parts of the road on the thirty minute ride to and from work each day are about as smooth as the upper half of the road to Commodore. I tend to wear a lot of my breakfast. If I didn't need the money, I think I would find some other way to pass the time, than work for the company. The only good thing about this gig, is that I help the soldiers get their mail, and I like to think I help them get it a little sooner, and in better condition than they would if I weren't here. If I sound like I'm whining a lot, I apologize for sounding that way. There are moments of enjoyment here, just not a lot of them. The housing situation with the company is much better than it is for the people (from India, The Phillipines, Nepal, and several other countries) who work for companies that are subcontractors to the contractors here. Those guys get rice and a small piece of chicken or fish for their meals, and have about the same amount of personal space that I would have had in the hooch they tried to put me in. They also make about a tenth of the money I make. Granted, what they make will go a lot further in the home economy than my money will go in my home economy, they still have it a lot rougher than I do over here.

Shredding Mail

I'm Leaving Camp Speicher today to go to Baghdad to learn to be a mail shredder. If you get mail from Iraq that is torn or damaged, you might be able to blame me. I'll be working with the uncle of Garfield (the comic strip cat), who has been responsible for most of your damaged mail in the States up until now.

Fun Patches

Here is a photo of the patches I am going to put on my paragliding harness. I may also try to pick up a couple more and put on my hang gliding harness. Linda, my wife, posted the photo for me. I still don't have a camera here, and no way to upload photos here yet.

Improvements

I'm settled into the new digs, and things are looking up. My new room mate is from Bosnia, and is tolerable of the cooler temps I prefer for sleeping. He said he would prefer we turn the A/C unit off, as it is a window unit and somewhat noisy, which is very much OK with me. I was at the billeting office this evening, and the woman who had not been overly friendly asked how things were now, and I told her it was excellent, and my room mate was standing there in the office. She did the "YESSS!!!" thing with the arm motions and all, when I told her I had a great room mate. Things are definitely better over here now than two years ago.

On another note, I noticed when I was logging in, the last post showed something like 3:45 am as the time when I posted it. If I can find where to adjust the time, I will get it changed to my local time, instead of the time at home. Currently it is ten hours later here than it is at home.

Smooth Air, Long Flights, and Soft Landings.

Patented Weight Loss Program

I started my patented weight loss program yesterday, and am having second thoughts about it this afternoon. If I wear my waistcoat around all the time, I'll lose weight! The waistcoat is covered by one or more patents, so I call it my patented weight loss program. I may start wearing it every other day, until I get a little more used to it, then go back to wearing it every day. It is one of the newer technology "lighter weight" systems, and only weighs about thirty or forty pounds. There are some of the guys here who claim theirs weighs upwards of sixty pounds. In case anyone isn't familiar with what a waistcoat is, it is a vest. I'll give you three guesses, as to what kind of waistcoat they give me to wear over here.

I also would like to add my supervisor told me if I needed to sleep somewhere other than my cheesebox because a roommate might think they have to have it waaaaay too warm, I should be able to find a cot out here. That way, I could sleep inside the bunker, instead of on top of it, and be able to stay cool, and keep everyone happy all at the same time. He also said if I had any problems with billeting, to let him know, and he could probably take care of any problems with them.

Busted!!!

Jon, the music is more boring now. The dance floor is smoother, and the band did not spend as much on pyrotechnics as they did at the previous ballroom where I went dancing. Thanks for commenting. I was beginning to wonder if I was typing this for myself, and no one was reading it.

On to the reason for this new post.
There I was sleeping soundly on top of my own concrete bunker, curled up in the sleeping bag the company had issued to me, with my head laying on the pillow they had issued to me, on top of my Turkish rug I had purchased yesterday, and some guy starts waving a flashlight at me and saying "SIR, SIR, SIR!!!" Turns out someone had said something to the wrong people about someone sleeping on top of a bunker, and there I was - BUSTED!!!

They did give me the keys to a differrent room that only has one person in it, and he had turned the heater off because it was too hot. And, it wasn't anywhere nearly as warm as the room I had slept in before I moved my sleeping arrangements to the top of the bunker. I also have an extra comforter I can give the guy in there in case it is too cool for him, as the new room had bedding for the new occupant in it, and I don't need any additional stuff. I think I will keep the good sleeping bag and pillow, just in case I might need to find alternate sleeping arrangements again!!! If I get on top of one of the cheeseboxes, and have the cooperation of whoever is in there, no one will see me!