Saturday, October 25, 2003

09:00 – Baghdad. We suffered our first casualty this morning. At about 05:45, a resounding “bang” resonated from the hallway outside of the office. Chris, our 65 year-old Dutch Transportation Engineer, had blacked out and collapsed in the hall on his way to work, loudly connecting his head with a file cabinet.

We woke the corpsman down the hall and brought his stretcher for Chris’ evacuation to the military hospital a few minutes away. By 09:00, Chris was back, a victim of dehydration. He got a couple of stitches as well, and one hell of a shiner. A little excitement to start the day, to be sure, but plenty of grind expected for the rest of the day.

Three more Baker people arrived last night, so our wee office is well beyond capacity. If our 16:00 meeting occurs as planned, Craig and Bob will join us bringing the temporary occupancy to sixteen.

I was hoping to get out of here for a while, but my 09:00 with the Ministry of Water Resources has been postponed, since all of the key players have gone to Madrid for the Donor’s Conference. Instead, I’ve got to convince the IT folks to solve my particular database problem and I need to convince the mapping people to drop everything else they are doing and assign all of their resources to the PMO. Maybe they need chocolate bars, silt stockings, or chewing tobacco? The last task is to perform a space efficiency/utility study for the office we hope to occupy within the next couple of weeks.

The new space will be ample, once we get it. Until that time, two of us have elected to move out of our office and into a piece of ACOE space on the other end of the building. It’s a long walk to coordinate face to face with the rest of the crew, but I get my own desk and a server connection, and three people won’t have to shift whenever someone enters the room.

Another Unverified Saddam Anecdote: All of his palace staff were Christian, because he thought they would be less likely to poison him or stage a palace coup.

For the surf-crazed, check out the Coalition web site at www.coalitioniraq.org. There’s little about the PMO at this time, but this should change as our exposure increases. The internal web site is a little more interesting, but you have to be here to access it. This is possible, as KBR/Halliburton is posting almost 300 positions in Iraq (they need another morale contractor).