Day 14. A little catch up

Dear Family-

I am sorry that I am a day or so behind. Getting acclimated and trying to get settled in has been a real challenge. The hardest part is trying to figure out what you need to do to get yourself settled in. The first thing that I have tried to tackle is trying to make this a "home". By the time you account for the travel to and from work and the 12 and a half hours at work, you pretty much add up to a 14 hour day. I think that it will be important to come back to someplace nice to relax and get charged up for the next day.

Today was my first day at the base. It turned out to be an administrative day for the most part. Once again, we had to jump through hoops to prove that we were actually people. You have to have copies of your orders for this, your passport for that, etc. Today was the first day I actually encountered what we all consider to be the quintessential government employees. We needed to get our base access cards so we went to the security department. When we got there, we were told that the system was down and that we would have to come back in a couple of hours. We said okay, and then we went over to the shop where we will be working. About an hour later, one of the networks guys comes in and says that he just finished replacing the switch at the security department and that everything was back online. We thought cool, lets get over there and get done before the line builds back up. When we got over there, we were told that the system was still down. We told them that it was back up because the network guys verified it before they left. To this they replied, "Our supervisor told us that the system was down and we have to wait for our supervisor to come back to tell us that it is back up. Please come back in two hours when our supervisor will be back from a meeting." No joke.

Other than this little fiasco, everything went pretty well today. I like the people and I think that the job will be cool. See you tomorrow!