Random Thoughts

I wonder... If I came back to America and started working a typical job, would it feel the same?

How would a 40 hour work week feel? It seems like 40 hours should be a part-time job. Those 8 hour shifts would be nice. Oh! and TWO whole days off? I wouldn't know what to do with that much free time!

We are at a busy point and have been for a few weeks and will be busy for another month, at least. Busy means 10-16 hour days, 6 days a week and then working for a few hours on our day off, sometimes that few hours turns into another day of work. If I didn't have to do service calls, talk to people, shake their hands, I wouldn't mind the field work - climbing on T-walls (concrete walls around the trailers), running around doing physical work in the sun. It's good for me since I'm not playing sports at the moment.

We are excited for the time when the network becomes fully functional and the housing area issues are solved. The time when we don't have 10-30 people per day complaining their Internet isn't working. The time when we can sit back and study how we can improve the network, rather than spreading ourselves thin and bending over backwards to fix issues that we know will be resolved when we are done with upgrades.

While a lot of soldiers understand we are in the middle of a warzone and desert, and that speeds and stability will be nothing like in America, not all tolerate the network as it is currently. We are working on getting the Internet out to a new housing area, as well as redesign an existing area to improve service, and change a few things on the back-end and also the hardware that is used to get the signal around the base.
Many, many soldiers don't care what we are trying to do, they have this mentality that it should be working and if it's not, we should be able to snap our fingers and fix it same day. Reminds me of America. Even some people who use the free Internet we provide in one spot complain that it's too slow or not stable. The free network.
Don't get me wrong, there are lots of really cool soldiers out here. Real nice guys and gals.


On another topic, I finally bought a watch so I can keep track of time now! Bought an alarm clock too, but haven't hooked it up yet.
My trimmer battery is pretty much dead and won't really charge, so my goatee has been growing a bit. Bought a trimmer today to resolve that. :)
Maybe I'll upload some pics someday. I'd like to get out and sneak some pics around the base. Just the thought of taking my camera out in the dust and heat all day makes me change my mind. I need to set some time aside to drive around, take pics, then go back to camp and return my camera to safety.