  Today was a badge making day. For those of you not up to speed on what's going on, I'll put together a post explaining all about my job here. But for now, all you need to know is that I'm in the Green Zone of Baghdad, Iraq, responsible for the security here. In that job, we have to make sure that the only people in the GZ are the ones that live here. In order to regualate that, we have to make badges. These badges are such a pain in my butt. Instead of just making a decision to issue out all new badges to everyone living here, the powers that be are trying to pass the buck to someone else. The CPA wants us to do it. We want the CPA to issue a badge. I'm thinking that it'll end up being ME and my company issuing badges. The badges issued by the unit before us were VERY simple. One sided and easy to make. But also, very easy to counterfeit.
Battalion decided we needed to make badges that were hard to dupe. Without getting into the details of it, I enlisted the help of some SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) in the field of ID card making (;-)) and came up with a pretty good badge, if I do say so myself. But the kicker is that they're harder and more time consuming to make. This isn't a big problem when you're making 10 or 20.
But for the 10,000 people that live in the Green Zone, it's a BIG deal. I only made 70 today and it took me all afternoon. Heaven help me when it's decided I have to make all 10,000 badges. Well, 9930 badges. Alright. Time for a shower and my bed. Later! 
