Breakfast with the SECDEF

Yeah, I know, I haven't been posting recently.  There's a lot of reasons why.  First, my company imposed a sudden change of leadership a few weeks ago.  I now find myself in charge here in the Kabul area, holding down three jobs, and working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.  My energy for any extra curricular activities is running low.  Second, the US Embassy shut down its free Wi-Fi that I've been stealing these last five months and now I have to scramble to locate any kind of free Internet access.  The only one I've found so far has crappy data throughput.  And third, I've been too cheap to pony up money to pay for crappy Internet service, but now it looks like I'll be forced to.  One of my guys who is leaving has turned over $7k worth of satellite downlink gear for the Internet service he ran out of his safe house.  I, along with a couple of other techs, will be standing this system back up in the near future.  But, we'll have to pay the provider for the bandwidth.  I suspect I'll be forking out a couple of hundred bucks a month just to ensure that I have sufficient bandwidth to stock trade and do the geek things that I like to do when I return back to the house.

So, this morning I headed to camp and entered the DFAC for a quick breakfast.  I saw that the area I normally sit in was more crowded than usual, but I found a seat, plopped down, and began chowing down.  A couple of folks next to me finished their breakfast and left.  I looked around and noticed a gentleman sitting a few chairs from me on my left.  He looked familiar.  Then I put it all together.  Secretary Gates was here visiting the chain-of-command and assessing the strategies that Gen McChrystal has implemented here. 

For someone who is in a terribly stressful job, Gates looks pretty good, especially for as old as he is.  I figure if he can survive all the stress and strain of his job, I certainly can get through another seven more months of my three jobs.  Not that I'm counting the days, or anything...