Nov 28, 2019


This is the first week where I felt I was entering my final leg- the final countdown had begun. My assignment of a lifetime was coming to an end- my boss announced my farewell party a good several weeks before I actually would leave for good. Martin left Iraq yesterday for the last time to take on his next assignment in Trinidad. I simply had to wind down over christmas and do a handover to my successor in January before I left mespotamia for good sometime in early february to settle into my new gig in dubai. There were no locals that showed up this week - same as last week. Today they did show up only to be evacuated by 11 am- as there was a rumour that roads would be blocked again and there would be more protests. Iraq’s arab spring looks like it has arrived  though perhaps 5 years too late. This is a land of 40 million people with median age 20. And it is no coincidence either. All the older people were pretty much driven to extinction by conflict starting in the 1970s - all the way until the end of Isis in 2017. And it took all of two meagre years of peace before the vestiges of an Arab spring have emerged. I feel sad for these Iraqi people and each day have a new found respect for India. For a nation with 30 times the population and a thirtieth the amount of oil, we are not doing badly. Many things don’t work in India but the most important things somehow do. The assignment was unique in so many ways. The commute from dubai every week presented challenges from the strangest of quarters. For example, if you are a watcher of Netflix you would need to realise that content you can watch in Iraq is different from what you can watch you can get in Dubai. But that is not all. In the camp in basra there are two wifi networks. One is a bgc network and the other a shell network. Not both are always available at the same time. If you used the bgc network then your content for Netflix would be as per the Netflix Iraq server. But if you use the shell wifi it will be as per the Netflix Dutch server since the shell network was based in the Netherlands. This meant yet another content repertoire. When you intersect these three conditions you might be well left with content you don’t even care about. Nick, my American team member has had an absolutely preposterous run at bgc thus far. He works 28 days (referred to as a work hitch) on and 28 days off. Last year he ended up joining his new job 3 months late because of a delay in issuance of his work visa. As he finally made it in- it was a matter of weeks before all us citizens had to be evacuated because of something predictably retarded that Donald Trump said or did. So back he went to Houston. And worked virtually from there. He got back after 2 months ( including his off hitch) and had one full work hitch in Iraq. And then it happened again because of this Arab spring that started in October 24th. This time we were all evacuated irrespective of nationality! So back he went to Houston and continued working virtually. I am considering having him work from houston permanently- he is doing it anyway. Why bother with the Iraq uplift to his salary? But it 

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