Well, my friend who got me the gig is an extremely reliable guy. However he's not in charge of this contract, one of his coworkers is. I can't seem to get any kind of reliable estimate as to when I might be leaving, they keep telling me to get ready and then nothing happens, worse they won't even give me a reasonable outline of the process. All I know right now is that my paper work is with the US Government and we're waiting on them. Great, that's helpful.
Anyway, in the meanwhile it turns out that it is likely that I won't be staying in the Green Zone when I first get there but instead one of the hardened business class hotels like this one:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/03/23/iraq.main/index.html
Worse they don't have in-room internet access. So I thought "this is dumb", there's hundreds of contractors making good money (and with big expense accounts) staying in these hotels -- they'd pay for in room access. A friend of mine started a WISP with international operations so I figured I'd put him in touch with the hotel. Well, the Big-X Consulting firm (increasingly becoming "Big-Dumb-Company") didn't like this at all, said that my involvement might be a conflict of interest and made me promise not to try to get internet access to the hotel. Whatever, I think I just agreed to sit in the dark for a few weeks because no one thought it would be appropriate to turn on the lights. Besides, I thought we were doing all of this to improve the Iraqi infrastructure ... so I'll guess I'll not do that because...?
The moral of the story: don't work for a big company.