Latchkey life

Everyone in my little Hundred Acre-Sandbox lives a latchkey life. It is sort of like a prison, but a nice prison. One with two nice gyms and a place where you can meet to knit or smoke cigars, not that I do either of those things at this time.

It’s like a little city. Since we can’t leave, everything’s here, down to the hair salon and barbershop to the water processing plant and firehouse. They’re staffed with fellow residents of the One Hundred-Acre Sandbox, and we come from all over. It’s not just my department colleagues who staff the place; we have other federal employees and contractors plus a lot of third-party contractors as well.

It might be a prison, but I have the most amazing prison cell ever.  Although there are several other housing complexes in the sandbox, the people with DoS have nice little one-bedroom apartments with a little sitting area (mine has a kitchen table full of crap), a pretty big bedroom – big enough for a comfy chair – and a decent-sized living room. The living room is exactly the size of the bedroom; at one point there were enough people here to necessitate roommates, but fortunately I missed that. Oh, and the bathtub is pretty deep. I’m so glad I don’t have to share that with anyone. There’s even a great storage closet that houses all the toiletries I brought for two years (it looks like miniature Target). Really, it’s an incredible prison cell.

Like a prison, the whole sandbox is secure. I’ll never leave the compound, although I did get lucky the other weekend and was allowed to step outside the door to meet someone coming in. That’s probably as much of Baghdad as I’ll see, and the only thing I noted was that people drive really fast on the road out front. I also noticed, looking at an outdate map, that where I live is somewhere near Saddam Hussein’s old house. I’m a terrible map-reader, though, and I could be off on that.

Part of the security is the fact that we have to wear our badges every time we leave our little prison cells. As a result, everyone has an ID badge hanging around their necks. It’s kind of fun to see everyone’s lanyards. Certain themes recur: former posts, the generic Baghdad one, sports teams. It’s amazing how many people see my Florida State one and approach me to sympathize about football season.

Badge holders are another big thing here. At previous posts, I’ve had two card things I need to carry around but here it’s four. I have two for the office, my ID and the most important one: my food card.  I need that when I eat, so I carry it around all the time. So, like a lot of people here, I bought a little badge holder that holds three cards. It also has what was marketed as a change purse, but in reality it’s a zipper that leads to a narrow sleeve that I might could force a single sheet of paper into. Ah well; I don’t really need money day-to-day here. I mean, it’s not like I’m using cigarettes for currency instead or anything like that, but there’s just nothing to buy.

When we get our prison cells, we’re given this gas station bathroom-sized keychain with three, I think it was, keys on it. I lugged the thing with me the first couple of days and I finally realized no one was juggling the bulky things. It took awhile to catch on, but I figured out everyone had taken the one key they needed off the gas station keychain (seriously, here now for two months and I am not entirely sure what the other keys go to) and fastened it to their lanyards. Some people wear theirs in front, and when you see many people walk by, you’ll see their housekey dangling from the back of their lanyards.

We don’t wander around without our badges and keys. After locking myself out one time (in my first week, no less), I fashioned a hook right under my peephole so there’s no way I miss it when I leave.

It’s very much a latchkey life.