…Day Four
30 July 2007
I wake up at 0900 and look around the room. It’s just me and the contractor that I can see, and he’s typing away at his computer. So I lie back down and in the blink of an eye it’s 1000. We gotta get going.
The contractor, his two techs, and I head next door to start our mission. The first step seems simple enough. Get with the G6 commander and find out what he thinks about where this equipment should go. The techs are both Iraqi so they can act as our interpreters and we have the floor plan printed out showing where we think everything should go. Too easy, right?
Yeah, well, I’ll do my best to explain this. We link up with the G6 and he rambles on about how he needs to be able to do this and those people don’t need that and he should have these and nobody but he should have those and on and on. To simplify matters, we gave him a smile, a nod, and a “shukran” (pronounced “shoo-cron” and is Arabic for “Thank you”), and decided to stick with what we had on the paper already.
We break for lunch before heading back to start the real work. We need to drill a few holes through the walls and run some cables through the ceiling, as well as go through all the rooms to get a feel for how the equipment will be layed out.
Our first task was to find a ladder. Now, gentle reader, I know what you must be thinking, “Why would a simple task such as this merit it’s own paragraph?” Well, friends, I will tell you now that one of the most important lessons I have learned in this year is that nothing, and I mean NOTHING, is as easy as it should be in Iraq! Period. (Yes I know I ended the sentence with an exclamation point and not, in fact a period. Just go with it!) Anyway, we need a ladder in order to get into the ceiling tiles and run the cables. There is a construction crew here and we know they have a ladder somewhere but it is not immediately apparent that they know they have a ladder somewhere! What they do have is a crudely constructed scaffold like object nailed together with pieces of scrap wood. With just a nudge of my foot it collapses on one side. “I’m not getting on that thing.”, I tell the contractor. A carpenter from the construction crew hurries over with a bucket of nails and a hammer, and has the scaffold back together within the minute. He even managed to add a couple pieces of wood for “stability” that seem to be doing their job (I kicked it again to make sure, hehe). “I’m still not getting on this thing.”, I say as we carry it inside. We set it down in front of the room that will one day be the server room and realize that the ceiling is still too high for us to be able to run the cables. *sigh* But oho!, what is this? Right outside the window at the end of the hall I spot the real ladder and all we have to do is wait for them to finish painting that spot on the wall and we can “acquire” it. While we wait for that, I decide it’s time to try something that I’ve been putting off for the past year.
We don’t get a steady supply of highly caffeinated sugar energy drinks out here like red bull, adrenaline rush, monster, etc. They do make an appearance at the px once in a while but they sell out really fast. “No energy drinks?? But, Aaron, how do you all get through the days?!“ The answer: “Rip it“. These little eight ounce cans with the bucking bronco logo come in three types: the orange colored cans are obviously orange flavored, the red cans are fruit punch, and the silver and blue cans are sugar free with no flavoring. The little bastards are like crack for a lot of the soldiers out here. I’ve seen the withdrawal symptoms and it’s not a pretty sight. It was for that very reason I have avoided them for so long. Things have changed now, though, and the time is right. I drink my first Rip it. It’s orange. It’s bubbly. It’s delicious! The lights get brighter and my capillaries are tingling. Yeah, I can feel them. Weird, but…cool. Shit, I’m hooked already.
So we begin the room search with the server room where the “stack” is (the stack is the term for the centralized location of the communication equipment e.g. modems, routers, etc usually stacked on top of one another (hence the name)). And this is what we see:
30 July 2007
I wake up at 0900 and look around the room. It’s just me and the contractor that I can see, and he’s typing away at his computer. So I lie back down and in the blink of an eye it’s 1000. We gotta get going.
The contractor, his two techs, and I head next door to start our mission. The first step seems simple enough. Get with the G6 commander and find out what he thinks about where this equipment should go. The techs are both Iraqi so they can act as our interpreters and we have the floor plan printed out showing where we think everything should go. Too easy, right?
Yeah, well, I’ll do my best to explain this. We link up with the G6 and he rambles on about how he needs to be able to do this and those people don’t need that and he should have these and nobody but he should have those and on and on. To simplify matters, we gave him a smile, a nod, and a “shukran” (pronounced “shoo-cron” and is Arabic for “Thank you”), and decided to stick with what we had on the paper already.
We break for lunch before heading back to start the real work. We need to drill a few holes through the walls and run some cables through the ceiling, as well as go through all the rooms to get a feel for how the equipment will be layed out.
Our first task was to find a ladder. Now, gentle reader, I know what you must be thinking, “Why would a simple task such as this merit it’s own paragraph?” Well, friends, I will tell you now that one of the most important lessons I have learned in this year is that nothing, and I mean NOTHING, is as easy as it should be in Iraq! Period. (Yes I know I ended the sentence with an exclamation point and not, in fact a period. Just go with it!) Anyway, we need a ladder in order to get into the ceiling tiles and run the cables. There is a construction crew here and we know they have a ladder somewhere but it is not immediately apparent that they know they have a ladder somewhere! What they do have is a crudely constructed scaffold like object nailed together with pieces of scrap wood. With just a nudge of my foot it collapses on one side. “I’m not getting on that thing.”, I tell the contractor. A carpenter from the construction crew hurries over with a bucket of nails and a hammer, and has the scaffold back together within the minute. He even managed to add a couple pieces of wood for “stability” that seem to be doing their job (I kicked it again to make sure, hehe). “I’m still not getting on this thing.”, I say as we carry it inside. We set it down in front of the room that will one day be the server room and realize that the ceiling is still too high for us to be able to run the cables. *sigh* But oho!, what is this? Right outside the window at the end of the hall I spot the real ladder and all we have to do is wait for them to finish painting that spot on the wall and we can “acquire” it. While we wait for that, I decide it’s time to try something that I’ve been putting off for the past year.
We don’t get a steady supply of highly caffeinated sugar energy drinks out here like red bull, adrenaline rush, monster, etc. They do make an appearance at the px once in a while but they sell out really fast. “No energy drinks?? But, Aaron, how do you all get through the days?!“ The answer: “Rip it“. These little eight ounce cans with the bucking bronco logo come in three types: the orange colored cans are obviously orange flavored, the red cans are fruit punch, and the silver and blue cans are sugar free with no flavoring. The little bastards are like crack for a lot of the soldiers out here. I’ve seen the withdrawal symptoms and it’s not a pretty sight. It was for that very reason I have avoided them for so long. Things have changed now, though, and the time is right. I drink my first Rip it. It’s orange. It’s bubbly. It’s delicious! The lights get brighter and my capillaries are tingling. Yeah, I can feel them. Weird, but…cool. Shit, I’m hooked already.
So we begin the room search with the server room where the “stack” is (the stack is the term for the centralized location of the communication equipment e.g. modems, routers, etc usually stacked on top of one another (hence the name)). And this is what we see:
Yeah, it’s what we call a “cluster fuck”. It looks like a rat’s nest made outta cat 5 cables. Just ridiculous! They’ve all been stepped on, tripped over, and generally abused to the point where we know that we’re gonna have to replace every damn cable there and figure out a way to keep this from happening again.
While we scheme and plan, we still must work. We get started by running a few lines from the server room to the other side of the building and drilling a few of the holes we’ll need. We quickly discover that this particular drill has a tendency to destroy the plaster as it bursts through the other side. This particular drill has a jack hammer feature that pounds away at whatever it’s drilling (whoa now! Heads out of the gutter people! Ahem, where was I?) Luckily, one of the rooms already had an access point where the air conditioner cables came into the room. This worked out okay until we tried to pull the new cables through the plastic housing of the A/C causing all the water stored in the unit to be dumped out right onto a guys sleeping mat (yeah, the Iraqis sleep in their offices)! We were able to plug it up eventually and had to call the construction guys over to fix it completely, but hey!, we got those damn cables in place!
It’s 1600 and we’ve drilled three holes, run six cables, and broken one air conditioner. We called it a day and took off. Without anything to really do I went ahead and used my down time to check out those cheap ass DVDs I’d picked up in Warhorse.
The copy of Harry Potter 5 was pretty bad with chunks of movie missing, but the Jackie Chan movies seem to be in good shape and it turns out the disc is an 8 in 1 instead of a 7 in 1. Pretty nice surprise. I watched Around the World in 80 Days and had a few good chuckles. I like Jackie’s sense of humor, especially when it comes to his action scenes.
Sleep came after the series of booms coming from somewhere further into the city. Our guards must have seen something though because the building shook with the bangs from the large caliber rifles on the roof. And just like that it’s…
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