Dear Spell Check, I Am Not a Terrorist

Dear spell check,

I may have a mercenary and a white Toyota HiLux on my wish list (and an unhealthy love of The Unit), but that doesn’t mean that I appreciate your auto corrections that pepper my e-mails with the following in place of my name and those of my friends:

• Taliban
• Warlord
• Bullet
• Amen

I’m an American expat in Australia for goodness sake.  Who do you think I’m writing to/about?  I fill my days with Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.  Just because my extracurricular conversations include helicopters, facilitation payments, various nonsexual ways to employ a hooker, assorted ways one’s wife will find out that one’s rotation isn’t actually six weeks on, two weeks off but 6 weeks on, four weeks off, and how much money one can fit in a money belt for third world travel, it doesn’t mean that I’m totally nuts.  I’m not a jihadist, I just spend too much time in and around the oilfield. 

How [Not] to Prepare Your Travel Documents

It's amazing what comes up during the course of a normal dinner conversation in the world that H and I have found ourselves living in. The other night we were out to dinner with some friends and instead of the usual conversations around politics, the state of the financial markets and upcoming vacation plans, H and I learned how to accidentally bribe a government official.

One of our friends shared a story from a business trip he had taken to what I'll refer to as an anonymous banana republic gone sour under military rule. He disembarked from his flight, queued at customs and handed over his passport, in its case, to the customs' official. The customs' official thumbed through it for a few moments before stamping it and handing it back. The guy's boss went next and after the customs' official paged through his passport, he started grilling him with questions. Our friend took the twenty minute delay to check out his new passport stamp and found that A$50 that he had stuck in the back of his case, along with various frequent flier cards and other scraps of paper, was now gone. Apparently the cash, and not the appropriate visa, which his boss was also in possession of, had smoothed his entry into the country. A$50 will get you 90% of a case of beer, a steak dinner for one, lawn seats at a cricket match or a question free entry into an anonymous Latin American country. I wonder what else this admission fee includes.