Disconnected

If we had one thing to complain about here, it would be connectivity. My preference would be to have the low thread count in my sheets as my only complaint, but such is not the case. There’re the food and housing and ineffective client to bitch about, but at the top of the complaint heap is the very obvious lack of a fast web connection.


We don’t surf, Skype, IM, shop, download or do any other large bandwidth activities. Mostly, we just want to get our mail, which is how we keep tabs on the home front and the office. Our incountry group is really just a part of the project team. Each of us has a discipline counterpart or two inCONUS who should be acting as a resource for the problems that we can’t solve here, be it through lack of time or resources. With lack of bandwidth being the critical resource, though, it’s really tough to get anything from our reachback component, and we end up being further isolated.

That’s why we hit the rack before 2100 each night, because at 0400 every morning, we’re back up and heading to the Boardwalk to get the best performance out of the FreedomTel WiFi. On past assignments to this end of the planet, we’ve had access to the Government telecom. It’s fast. Really fast. The polar opposite from FreedomTel, which is like dialup on Prozac, more like telegraph than telephony. This trip, it’s up to the Contractor, us, to connect ourselves, and our options are limited.

There’s what we call the DutchNet, which is a for-pay service managed by the Dutch PX folks. It’s markedly faster then FreedomTel, but costs about five Euros an hour (keeps the riffraff off line) so it’s our backup service. Even with the DutchNet, atmospheric interference can destroy any hope of downloading our mail in less than an hour, and we oftentimes give up, tired of staring at an unmoving status bar.

At this moment, my machine is picking up ten wireless networks of varying strengths. However, most of them are secure and not accessible to us. We keep our eyes and ears open for options and hope something will show up.

I suppose there’s always the MWR tent down near the RSOI. It’s likely open at this time of day, so we could avoid the crowds that spill out of the door every evening of those wanting to use one of a dozen machines that they’ve got hooked up. However, time on line is limited to 30 minutes and the use of your own equipment is forbidden, so we’d never be able to effectively secure data. Just as well. The big users at the MWR tent are Soldiers and Marines, who need some way to get a message home.

We’re fortunate, I guess. We have connections, even if they’re slow. We have expense reports that we can use to charge five Euros at a time when we need something fast(er). We (I) even have a cell phone (although its number is a closely guarded secret).

On the other side, 10,000 plus fighting men and women have a dozen and a half free phones and a small bank of computers to use to update their families. They get paid shit and have to spend a year or more over here.

Which leads to the job, which is to make their conditions more tolerable. We won’t be adding bandwidth, but some of our subprojects will help to move them out of tent cities, and into a DFAC that isn’t made of canvas, and give them a few more bathrooms that actually flush.

Life as a Contractor is pretty good, by comparison.