Why I Love My Job: Reason 122
HR definitely puts the 'fun' back in dysfunctional.
Travel around here is a logistical nightmare. Always has been. Just when you think things are getting better, someone alters the rules. I'll skip the horrid details of people getting lost for days on end, getting stuck in a place they weren't supposed to be, having to sleep in bug-infested transient rooms on camp, etc. Never mind the fact that to travel out of the country from an outer site, you have to begin the journey up to two weeks before you are due to fly out of DXB.
The process is that you must manifest three days in advance to get a charter flight. You cannot manifest until you arrive at the main camp for your area (I am fortunate to be at a main camp, but stay with me here). To get to the main camp, you must fly Mil-Air. Mil-Air is, of course, not regularly scheduled, and civilians always fly space-a (dependent on availability). So you can wait days to get on Mil-Air, arrive at the main camp, wait three more days to get on a Charter flight to Baghdad (I'll go into the Charter flight nightmares another time, that is definitely a story all to itself), then can wait another two-four days to get manifested out of Baghdad. While you wait in Baghdad, you sleep in transient trailers at BTC. I'll spare you the details. The trailers are a nightmare. And if anything happens, like it has a tendency to in a freakin war zone, the whole damn system backs up.
BIAP (Baghdad Airport) is a world unto it's own. There really is no government in Iraq right now. Yeah, there are some people attempting to nail down a constitution, but government as we know it does not exist. Think about it. It is strange. You have a country, it seems to kind of be functioning, but no one knows exactly how. BIAP is the frontier of this Wild West we live in. There have been no commercial flights into BIAP since Gulf War I. The airport never was upgraded, never got computers. Electricity is coming back on, and sometimes the A/C works. Someone, somewhere, has been replacing light bulbs and doing some painting. But the bathrooms have not been cleaned (see my first posts!) in fifteen years. I looked at the pictures of the Convention Center in New Orleans and thought to myself, shit, that's nothing. You should see the bathrooms at BIAP...
So, without a government, there is no transportation system. Hmmm. Interesting. So there are no flight standards, no IFR, nothing. The system for passing through this airport of no return is spooky. It technically does not exist. There are no luggage racks, no toilet paper, no usual supplies of an airport. When you check in your luggage, you basically kiss it goodbye and hope it comes out the other end OK. What is a prohibited item changes each day, given that there is no government and no flight standards. So they frequently abscond with your luggage, as it has mysteriously been determined to be a threat, and take it downstairs, where they rifle through it and steal everything inside. You can't complain. There is no government, and therefore, no one to complain to, remember?
The most interesting thing is what I like to call the "security peep show." Given that this is a Muslim country, certain standards of modesty apply. So you go through the x-ray machine, and pass into a lobby. The baggage extortionists have already claimed your suitcase by this point. You wait until the scary looking Ghurka security guards summon your group, then you pass to another lobby. You can spend hours waiting. Flights here in no-man's land are not scheduled.
The women are usually pulled to the head of the line. At first, I thought, "how nice, they are finally cutting us some slack." Then I realized what was really going on. Being Iraq, female airport personnel must pat-down the women passengers, and male airport personnel must pat-down the men. So the women, at the head of the line, are summoned into another lobby that is divided from the main lobby by only a wall of glass. There is a wooden divider that each woman must stand behind, to shield her from anyone else in the lobby she just entered. However, and this is the interesting part, she faces the glass wall, looking back into the main lobby where all the men are still waiting, and is subjected to the pat-down in full view of her colleagues. And, being that there are no standards, and no one to complain to, the pat-down is the full we-suspect-you-are-a-terrorist-and-that-lump-is-a-glock-not-a-breast pat-down, not the abbreviated we-can-get-sued-if-we-touch-you-there TSA pat-down.
Really, to call it a pat-down is deceiving and ridiculously American. I have had lovers who have never touched me the way these black-abaya'ed babes have. They squeeze your breasts, full on, with the room full of men behind the glass watching, smiling. I'm just waiting for them to start waving dollar bills at us. Then they go for the crotch. Does anyone really hide a grenade in the ole pussy? Really, too much is too much. If they pull out forceps, I'm speaking to my travel agent.
The first time they did this to me, I was so stunned I froze as she continued her slow grope. The second time, I looked down at her, her face uncomfortably close to my crotch, and introduced myself, saying that I felt we knew eachother well enough that we should at least exchange phone numbers. I don't know if she understood what I said, but she smiled and politely nodded. I figure I'm doing OK as long as she doesn't start yelling Allah Akbar or something.
So, by the time you get to Dubai to catch your commercial flight, you are already exhausted, pissed off, and eager to slam as many drinks as you can possibly stomach in one sitting.
Oh, and while in Dubai, waiting for your commercial flight, you do not get a company hotel room unless your flight leaves later than 3AM. And, for some strange reason, the vast majority of flights that leave for Europe and the US all leave between 1-2:30AM. Hmmm. Coincidence? So you sit in the lovely humidity of the Dubai evening with nothing to do but wait. And drink, I suppose. So, you've been traveling two weeks already to get to Dubai. You are hot, tired, pissed. And you arrive in Dubai at roughly 5PM, and must stay awake because you have no room to go to. You sit at the bar until roughly midnight, then head to the airport three hours before your flight, which can be as long as 3o hours. Nice, huh?
I have to say one thing, though. We are tough. The people that come here, the people that stay, accept the fact that we are not living in a normal world. We accept discomfort. We accept the unknown. We accept that our tickets will be lost, our itineraries incorrect, our arrival and departures uncertain. We work in Iraq. This is a place like nowhere else in the world right now. We appreciate that there are no guarantees in this job, and we take much of the inconveniences that we are subjected to with a grain of salt. We grumble a bit, but it is usually a shared, good-natured whining rather than malignant morale. We put up with every nightmare known to man here. And we stay. We are tough.
But the usual travel experience is so exhausting that I always leave a day or two early and book my own room, elsewhere, at least you can take a shower and a nap for your 30 hour flight back to the states. At least, that is what I did when I traveled with David. We managed to have fun amidst the chaos of war logistics. But most of the tight-wad Texans here will not spring for a room, instead preferring the company of their fellow drunken, pissed off travelers at the bar at the company hotel. It is always entertaining to see men slamming drinks after four months of being dry. We've already been banned from one other hotel in Dubai (following an embarrassing incident involving a drunken 400 lb. man passed out naked in the lobby elevator), and are fast approaching getting kicked out of the only one left that will take us. Iraq is not the real war zone. That fucking bar at the hotel is. C'est la guerre....
OK, so I haven't even gotten to what my point was in the beginning. So following the latest shutdown of the Baghdad Airport, HR has come up with another brilliant plan. See, if no one can move in or out, thousands of us get stuck with nowhere to sleep. We miss our commercial flights out, and have to be reticketed. It only takes a few hours of delay to collapse the entire scheme. When I came into DXB last, the airport had shut down for two days. There were no more hotel rooms in Dubai. They had people arriving from lengthy flights, exhausted and hot, and had to stack them in the lobby of the hotel waiting for rooms to open up. They never did. If you can't move them onward, how do you get them to check out? Duh. So, there was alot of griping going on about that. It was a mess.
Viola!! HR saves the day! New procedure! Now, if the airport shuts down, we are routed back to our camps, go to the back of the line, and start the process all over again. Now, remember, you might have just spent two weeks getting to Baghdad. Now you have to go in the reverse direction, and start back to Baghdad again. Excuse me???????
So, bear with me, I am getting to my point. Let's talk about ticketing. The ticketing process is a mess. There is one agency in Dubai that tickets us. They are overwhelmed. Now they refuse to ticket you if you request multiple stops. Too much work for them. So instead of dealing with the issue, that the agency is overwhelmed, they just make another rule that makes it impossible for us. Normally, due to the fact that things happen (the airport shuts down, we are attacked, there is a monster dust storm, etc.) it is advisable for HR to purchase your flight tickets. That way, if you are delayed, HR will reticket at no cost to you. But if you book your own ticket online, and something happens to delay you, you eat the ticket. So what person in their right mind would book their own ticket and roll the dice??
So I requested my ticket to Istanbul, and waited patiently. Ho hum. The price I saw online ran around $400 or so. Not bad, and, best of all, it was a daytime flight so I was eligible to get a room when I arrived in Dubai. Great!
Not so great. When HR sent me my itinerary, they had booked me on a flight that cost nearly $800, and departed at 2AM. Hmmm. That way they don't have to put me up for the night. But there was no fucking way I was paying $800 for a two hour flight. So I refused the itinerary and told them that I was physically looking at flight such and such, and the price was $400. I requested they book it. A couple hours later, they informed me that $800 was the best they could do.
So I had to book the flight on my own. If the airport shuts down, I am screwed. But now that the new and oh-so-improved travel policy is in effect, if the airport shuts down, I am screwed royally because I am no longer automatically scheduled to depart the next available flight out, I have to go to the back of the queue and start the process all over again. And the extra ticketing that would be required for this, added to the fact that the agency in Dubai already can't keep up with the current workload required of them, will-let me guess-grind the entire process to a complete stop.
Aaaaah. The perfect vacation!!!!! Groped and royally screwed. How could I possibly ask for more?
I am no rocket scientist. But does this make sense to anyone? Anyone besides HR, that is?
Travel around here is a logistical nightmare. Always has been. Just when you think things are getting better, someone alters the rules. I'll skip the horrid details of people getting lost for days on end, getting stuck in a place they weren't supposed to be, having to sleep in bug-infested transient rooms on camp, etc. Never mind the fact that to travel out of the country from an outer site, you have to begin the journey up to two weeks before you are due to fly out of DXB.
The process is that you must manifest three days in advance to get a charter flight. You cannot manifest until you arrive at the main camp for your area (I am fortunate to be at a main camp, but stay with me here). To get to the main camp, you must fly Mil-Air. Mil-Air is, of course, not regularly scheduled, and civilians always fly space-a (dependent on availability). So you can wait days to get on Mil-Air, arrive at the main camp, wait three more days to get on a Charter flight to Baghdad (I'll go into the Charter flight nightmares another time, that is definitely a story all to itself), then can wait another two-four days to get manifested out of Baghdad. While you wait in Baghdad, you sleep in transient trailers at BTC. I'll spare you the details. The trailers are a nightmare. And if anything happens, like it has a tendency to in a freakin war zone, the whole damn system backs up.
BIAP (Baghdad Airport) is a world unto it's own. There really is no government in Iraq right now. Yeah, there are some people attempting to nail down a constitution, but government as we know it does not exist. Think about it. It is strange. You have a country, it seems to kind of be functioning, but no one knows exactly how. BIAP is the frontier of this Wild West we live in. There have been no commercial flights into BIAP since Gulf War I. The airport never was upgraded, never got computers. Electricity is coming back on, and sometimes the A/C works. Someone, somewhere, has been replacing light bulbs and doing some painting. But the bathrooms have not been cleaned (see my first posts!) in fifteen years. I looked at the pictures of the Convention Center in New Orleans and thought to myself, shit, that's nothing. You should see the bathrooms at BIAP...
So, without a government, there is no transportation system. Hmmm. Interesting. So there are no flight standards, no IFR, nothing. The system for passing through this airport of no return is spooky. It technically does not exist. There are no luggage racks, no toilet paper, no usual supplies of an airport. When you check in your luggage, you basically kiss it goodbye and hope it comes out the other end OK. What is a prohibited item changes each day, given that there is no government and no flight standards. So they frequently abscond with your luggage, as it has mysteriously been determined to be a threat, and take it downstairs, where they rifle through it and steal everything inside. You can't complain. There is no government, and therefore, no one to complain to, remember?
The most interesting thing is what I like to call the "security peep show." Given that this is a Muslim country, certain standards of modesty apply. So you go through the x-ray machine, and pass into a lobby. The baggage extortionists have already claimed your suitcase by this point. You wait until the scary looking Ghurka security guards summon your group, then you pass to another lobby. You can spend hours waiting. Flights here in no-man's land are not scheduled.
The women are usually pulled to the head of the line. At first, I thought, "how nice, they are finally cutting us some slack." Then I realized what was really going on. Being Iraq, female airport personnel must pat-down the women passengers, and male airport personnel must pat-down the men. So the women, at the head of the line, are summoned into another lobby that is divided from the main lobby by only a wall of glass. There is a wooden divider that each woman must stand behind, to shield her from anyone else in the lobby she just entered. However, and this is the interesting part, she faces the glass wall, looking back into the main lobby where all the men are still waiting, and is subjected to the pat-down in full view of her colleagues. And, being that there are no standards, and no one to complain to, the pat-down is the full we-suspect-you-are-a-terrorist-and-that-lump-is-a-glock-not-a-breast pat-down, not the abbreviated we-can-get-sued-if-we-touch-you-there TSA pat-down.
Really, to call it a pat-down is deceiving and ridiculously American. I have had lovers who have never touched me the way these black-abaya'ed babes have. They squeeze your breasts, full on, with the room full of men behind the glass watching, smiling. I'm just waiting for them to start waving dollar bills at us. Then they go for the crotch. Does anyone really hide a grenade in the ole pussy? Really, too much is too much. If they pull out forceps, I'm speaking to my travel agent.
The first time they did this to me, I was so stunned I froze as she continued her slow grope. The second time, I looked down at her, her face uncomfortably close to my crotch, and introduced myself, saying that I felt we knew eachother well enough that we should at least exchange phone numbers. I don't know if she understood what I said, but she smiled and politely nodded. I figure I'm doing OK as long as she doesn't start yelling Allah Akbar or something.
So, by the time you get to Dubai to catch your commercial flight, you are already exhausted, pissed off, and eager to slam as many drinks as you can possibly stomach in one sitting.
Oh, and while in Dubai, waiting for your commercial flight, you do not get a company hotel room unless your flight leaves later than 3AM. And, for some strange reason, the vast majority of flights that leave for Europe and the US all leave between 1-2:30AM. Hmmm. Coincidence? So you sit in the lovely humidity of the Dubai evening with nothing to do but wait. And drink, I suppose. So, you've been traveling two weeks already to get to Dubai. You are hot, tired, pissed. And you arrive in Dubai at roughly 5PM, and must stay awake because you have no room to go to. You sit at the bar until roughly midnight, then head to the airport three hours before your flight, which can be as long as 3o hours. Nice, huh?
I have to say one thing, though. We are tough. The people that come here, the people that stay, accept the fact that we are not living in a normal world. We accept discomfort. We accept the unknown. We accept that our tickets will be lost, our itineraries incorrect, our arrival and departures uncertain. We work in Iraq. This is a place like nowhere else in the world right now. We appreciate that there are no guarantees in this job, and we take much of the inconveniences that we are subjected to with a grain of salt. We grumble a bit, but it is usually a shared, good-natured whining rather than malignant morale. We put up with every nightmare known to man here. And we stay. We are tough.
But the usual travel experience is so exhausting that I always leave a day or two early and book my own room, elsewhere, at least you can take a shower and a nap for your 30 hour flight back to the states. At least, that is what I did when I traveled with David. We managed to have fun amidst the chaos of war logistics. But most of the tight-wad Texans here will not spring for a room, instead preferring the company of their fellow drunken, pissed off travelers at the bar at the company hotel. It is always entertaining to see men slamming drinks after four months of being dry. We've already been banned from one other hotel in Dubai (following an embarrassing incident involving a drunken 400 lb. man passed out naked in the lobby elevator), and are fast approaching getting kicked out of the only one left that will take us. Iraq is not the real war zone. That fucking bar at the hotel is. C'est la guerre....
OK, so I haven't even gotten to what my point was in the beginning. So following the latest shutdown of the Baghdad Airport, HR has come up with another brilliant plan. See, if no one can move in or out, thousands of us get stuck with nowhere to sleep. We miss our commercial flights out, and have to be reticketed. It only takes a few hours of delay to collapse the entire scheme. When I came into DXB last, the airport had shut down for two days. There were no more hotel rooms in Dubai. They had people arriving from lengthy flights, exhausted and hot, and had to stack them in the lobby of the hotel waiting for rooms to open up. They never did. If you can't move them onward, how do you get them to check out? Duh. So, there was alot of griping going on about that. It was a mess.
Viola!! HR saves the day! New procedure! Now, if the airport shuts down, we are routed back to our camps, go to the back of the line, and start the process all over again. Now, remember, you might have just spent two weeks getting to Baghdad. Now you have to go in the reverse direction, and start back to Baghdad again. Excuse me???????
So, bear with me, I am getting to my point. Let's talk about ticketing. The ticketing process is a mess. There is one agency in Dubai that tickets us. They are overwhelmed. Now they refuse to ticket you if you request multiple stops. Too much work for them. So instead of dealing with the issue, that the agency is overwhelmed, they just make another rule that makes it impossible for us. Normally, due to the fact that things happen (the airport shuts down, we are attacked, there is a monster dust storm, etc.) it is advisable for HR to purchase your flight tickets. That way, if you are delayed, HR will reticket at no cost to you. But if you book your own ticket online, and something happens to delay you, you eat the ticket. So what person in their right mind would book their own ticket and roll the dice??
So I requested my ticket to Istanbul, and waited patiently. Ho hum. The price I saw online ran around $400 or so. Not bad, and, best of all, it was a daytime flight so I was eligible to get a room when I arrived in Dubai. Great!
Not so great. When HR sent me my itinerary, they had booked me on a flight that cost nearly $800, and departed at 2AM. Hmmm. That way they don't have to put me up for the night. But there was no fucking way I was paying $800 for a two hour flight. So I refused the itinerary and told them that I was physically looking at flight such and such, and the price was $400. I requested they book it. A couple hours later, they informed me that $800 was the best they could do.
So I had to book the flight on my own. If the airport shuts down, I am screwed. But now that the new and oh-so-improved travel policy is in effect, if the airport shuts down, I am screwed royally because I am no longer automatically scheduled to depart the next available flight out, I have to go to the back of the queue and start the process all over again. And the extra ticketing that would be required for this, added to the fact that the agency in Dubai already can't keep up with the current workload required of them, will-let me guess-grind the entire process to a complete stop.
Aaaaah. The perfect vacation!!!!! Groped and royally screwed. How could I possibly ask for more?
I am no rocket scientist. But does this make sense to anyone? Anyone besides HR, that is?
posted by akantha at 10:22 AM
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