New Job

I find myself sitting at a different desk from the one that I first occupied a little less than a month ago. When I first arrived, I was assigned as the Chief of Contracting at the Regional Contracting Office-Baghdad. However, about a week ago, my boss quietly pulled me aside and told me not to get too comfortable. It seems that my small office had been identified to be absorbed into a somewhat larger office in the next few months. This move would pretty much leave me out in the cold without a place to call home (or “work” in this situation). So rather than wait for the inevitable to occur and then move me, my boss decided to move me now and have someone who only has a few months remaining in his deployment take over my original job.

So where does that leave me?

Well, I am now the Oil Sector Chief for the Joint Contracting Command-Iraq.

In a nutshell, I am responsible for overseeing the contracts that the US has in place to rebuild the Iraqi Oil Infrastructure (mainly, rebuilding pipes, pumps, oil processing plants, etc). Anything that deals with getting the oil out of the ground and getting it to market falls within my sector.

Now, of course, I am not making decisions about where to pump for oil. There is a whole office full of smart people working with the Iraqi Ministry of Oil doing that. But when those people need a contract to have a civilian company come in to do work to rebuild an oil plant, I’m responsible for making those contracts happen.

This has been going on since 2003 and we have major contracts in place throughout the country, so what I’m doing in overseeing the administration of those contracts and adding new work to them.

Its exciting work and I’m actually glad that I was pulled away when I was. I’ll be learning a lot from this job and getting experience with a type of contract that I haven’t work with before. I’ll also be able to do some traveling outside of the IZ from time to time. I’ve got a great group of people working for me and the days are certainly going by faster than in the other job.

When you think about it, I was born to do this job. I mean, after all, how many thousands of gallons of gas did I pump at my Dad’s gas station growing up?