You know when your luck has run out.

Back again in the Middle East, this time at some beastly hot and dusty base outside of a modern gleaming city. We overcame some logistical trouble on the way here – delayed flights and a Lufthansa pilot strike being the major culprits – but persevered. Soon after landing, we picked up our rental cars and got lost, but a spate of dead reckoning served us well. At the base the next morning, our US military contact met us at the gate and got us right through. We thought we had survived the worst of it.

But on day three in country, the tides changed. I’ll blame arrogance. Not mine, not my team’s, but our government minder, who ignored all of the warnings and warning signs.


This trip falls coincident with one of the major Eids, a Muslim holyday that gets celebrated for a week. Imagine, however, that instead of going home to celebrate with your family for a few days, you get to stand post. Further imagine that the base is entirely empty, because everyone you work with is celebrating with their families, a stark reminder that you should have the day off and not be standing post. The next bit of imagining would be your reaction when a representative of the great Satan wants access to your base, forcing you from your reverie to open the gate by which you are standing post.

So it was absolutely no surprise when I saw the guard demand the backpack from said minder driving the car in front of us and confiscate the enclosed laptop. We had been told, numerous times over the prior few days, that local security might not want to be there over the holiday, and might take it out on us, so keep your technology in the trunk. Someone wasn’t listening.

Once alerted, the following two vehicles were stopped, trunks opened, and computers confiscated.

There’s a full color, two meter tall panel at the Host Nation badging office that clearly shows what they don’t want you to bring on base; weapons, computers, smart phones, GPSs, data storage devices, and VHS tapes to start. Our minder had an obvious computer bag on the front seat, a Blackberry in the console, and a GPS struck to the windshield, yet his reaction to the guard’s action was that he had done nothing wrong.

Wrong. The tacit arrangement was that we wouldn’t be jerks about violating their rules. Instead, we needed to spend ninety minutes retrieving our machines, so that we could lock them in the trunk of one of the cars that we would now leave outside of the gate. Who knows what a day’s worth of Middle Eastern sun would do to the contents of a trunk? We didn’t have much of a choice, short of returning to the hotel in the city and losing a few more hours.

Cleansed of our computers, we made it through the first gate, but were stopped at the second perimeter, where the now fully alerted guard snatched one of our cameras. This was turning into a slow morning, but plenty of cajoling and assurances got it returned to us and we were on our way to the third gate, U.S. controlled, where the guys at the gate had a different playbook, and allowed access with our computers, smartphones and cameras.

Except that later one of our cameras was confiscated by the US security, who thought we were photographing something on the list they can’t show us of things we can’t photograph. The resolution to that took another 40 minutes, four cops, and the deletion of everything on the data card.

Since then, we’ve left our machines at the hotel, risking the smartphones we use to take clandestine pictures of things we’re pretty sure are engineering related and not secret squirrel related. The major downside is that we have to take notes by hand, which equates to many hours of transcribing them by lamplight well into the evening. This cuts down on the time available to eat shawarma and mezza.

Again, we’ll persevere. If you can’t improvise and adjust to changing circumstances, you won’t make it long in the chaotic world of a global engineering consultant.

For example, this morning, we were trying to get some data off of a laptop (FOUO data, not Classified data). We’d tried emailing the files, but without an appropriate connection to the mother server attachments were impossible. We’d tried printing as pdf’s to mail, but the machine wouldn’t let us print. Ultimately, we hooked up an external hard drive as a file transfer device. This worked to get one set of files transferred, but ended up giving my machine the computer equivalent of SARS, or MERS, or Ebola. Regardless, I don’t have wifi now, which makes getting data from every other source a little more difficult, especially since the data outlets in this hotel don’t seem to work.

Maybe we can open up my phone as a hotspot and hardwire the phone to the machine? Some kind of McGruder solution is sure to do the trick.

Or blow up in my face.

I’ll let the help desk figure it out next week.
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