It's December

Oh to Money as we don’t have any. The “rumor” is the Afghanistan national bank office on base that has the only two bank machines has forgotten to renew their employees ID badges to get on base. This process for Afghans can take over a month, until that is done there is no one who can come and refill the bank machines. Not a big deal as we can eat at the mess and such but no buying extras. Now some have brook down and are sending western union to themselves and eating the quite large service fees. I can wait as I done most of my shopping already.

The fencing is going well. We have one who is a baronial champion back home from the out lands here but he’s only here once in a while. Its nice taking on some one of that skill level as Eric and Fred are now rotated out. Most of the people at fencing have done little to no sword practice before coming here other then on their D&D character sheets or swinging sticks with friends in the back yard.

Well December is looking good any way. There is a poster being sent around proclaiming we will have Van Halen here sometime this month. Most are a bit worried as the poster looks a little bit too amateur to be real. The Rumor got strength when we got a Email from the company in which it listed it as “Van Halen the Magician”. We are going to get a double ration of beer this month as well and a few extra barbecues. As this is cheap beer I don’t actually drink I’m not too excited about that but others are.

The other rumor of the day is that one of our competitors may lose the NATO contract for the base. They have a habit of bringing in top experts from N. America and Europe when they first get a contract then about one third of the way in they replace them with untrained personal they recruit from third world nations paying them about 1/5 the amount. From what I can see this is actually a common practice among the industry. Before anyone asks my company and other Canadian Forces contractors don’t for most part do this as CF is quite anal on contract quality assurance. Not to be confused with Canadian Companies that do contracts for other nations and NATO who do this practice all the time.

The example of this is the FOOD; yes I’m back at the food thing as its less disgusting then the bathroom cleaning example. The NATO mess here is staffed mostly from India and South Asian countries. Originally they had people from England and the US but after six months of getting the contract they were phased out. That’s why we say you get better food from the small Canadian base camps out in the war zone then you do here at a camp the size of a small city.

Oh on a final thought I been told from a friend sending me stuff that you get free shipping to military personal for December. SO PLEASE send things if you know anyone in the sand box as it does make a big difference getting stuff from home.