How we got internet (I should know this, right?)
Current mood: busy

Its around 4pm, and here I sit at work. We sort of ease up on a few of our many details and relax a little bit. Just some basic vehicle maintenance, and clean-up stuff. None of our major construction projects.

I just bought a new DVD the other day, I dont know if anyones ever seen Boston Legal, but its just hilarious. Im sure some of the guys in the rooms connected to mine must think Im nuts hearing me laughing out loud in a little bitty room all by myself, but that show is just SO funny.

Now for a quick saga on our internet connection purchase. Some of the guys from third platoon (my mortar section is currently attached to our second platoon) went out wheeling and dealing to try and find the best bargain for a satellite internet system. They finally hooked up with some company out of Poland, and then getting the money to change hands and all that was even more complicated. Something about wire transfers, and currency conversions. Im pretty sure the whole deal ran to around $10,000. But when you split that up amongst forty people its really not so bad. But the company was dragging their feet getting us an invoice, then once we confirmed the invoice it took them almost a week to confirm the wire transfer of payment. Finally we found out all the equipment couldnt be shipped via US mail because the packages were too large. Understandable, as one of the components is a 1.2 meter satellite dish.

Well, the company in Poland decided to FedEx the stuff to us. This would be great except that for security reasons were not allowed to put the camp were on as part of our mailing address. So all they had was the name of some random staff sergeant, our unit and an APO address. Last week we got an e-mail from our vendor (Polish internet incorporated or something) saying the stuff had shipped and was sitting in the Fed Ex office in Baghdad. Wed need to make some kind of arrangements ourselves to get it from Baghdad to us.

Now Baghdad isnt much further away from us then Lincoln is from Omaha, but it might as well be the moon. We dont travel outside the wire, and if we did we certainly wouldnt be allowed to just up and decide that we need to go to the FedEx office in Baghdad.

But whats this? One of our extremely resourceful Sergeants (whos also an electrician in Fremont) discovered that theres a FedEx office on this very post. This shouldnt have been such a mystery to us, as we see airplanes with a huge red and blue FedEx printed on the side flying in and out of this place almost every day. So we decided to send him (our electrician sergeant from Fremont) over to the FedEx office and see if he could do anything to get our package to our location.

Well, theres good news and bad news. Apparently our package couldnt possibly BE in Baghdad, since according to the FedEx guys here on base theres no FedEx office IN Baghdad. Oh Crap! our guy thought, wondering where the hell our rather expensive equipment might be sitting right now.

Not to worry though. said the FedEx guy. Show me your tracking number and well see if we can determine where it really went.

We produced our tracking number, and computer keys clicked for a few moments. Well gentlemen, this is your lucky day. This immediately has us worried, as there dont really seem to BE many lucky days here in Iraq except the day you fly home. Your package is sitting in that shipping container right over there. In fact its been there for three days, and wed sure appreciate you getting it off our hands. So maybe there ARE lucky days in Iraq, theyre just few and far between.

Of course the package didnt ship completely, and running network cable to twenty plus different little hooches around our company area has proved to be a time consuming and somewhat thankless task (thank our electrician from Fremont, as he has done A LOT of work). Now one of my other sergeants whos a welder and metal worker (and amateur boxer) from Columbus is busy building us the framework on which well hang our satellite dish. Can anyone imagine just how hard it is to find three inch outside diameter heavy pipe on a camp in Iraq? Pretty freakin difficult, let me tell you!

So tonight instead of going to the gym Ill hopefully be configuring a router, and terminating a BUNCH of Cat5 cable, then (hooray) well have internet in our rooms!

I need to find my photobucket account so I can link some of the pictures Im taking of all this, and show them on my blog. Maybe thatll be mission number one when we get everything connected.