The day bureaus are permitted to start extending assignment offers to successful bidders on the Special Incentive Post (SIP) bid cycle is called handshake day. In the lead-up to SIP handshake day, my life was a little chaotic. So much so, in fact, I almost lost track of the fact handshake day was coming. It’s not that I actually forgot about it; I was certainly aware. But I wasn’t exactly twiddling my thumbs and waiting for it to arrive, either.
I had submitted four SIP bids at three posts by the time they were due on June 16. I was excited about the chance to put my hand up for a more challenging – and better-paid – position and the possibility of actually being selected. My references and resume had shaped up the best of any bid season to date. I knew I had a good shot.
I was also excited about getting to skip regular bidding this fall if I already had an SIP handshake locked in. I didn’t love the misalignment between SIP handshake day in early July, and the Long Term Training and Detail (LTTD) rolling handshakes throughout July and August; accepting an SIP offer if it came first would eliminate my availability for an LTTD job without the possibility of getting both choices simultaneously and having a chance to decide between them.
In my case, I only bid one assignment from the LTTD cycle – an interagency detail too fascinating to pass up despite my not particularly wanting to stay domestic in the Washington, D.C. area for another year. This job would be worth it. But it was also very competitive with almost a dozen bidders in contention, so I was never counting my chickens. It isn’t like I could afford to turn down an SIP offer in the hopes an LTTD offer would later materialize. I only bid on jobs I really wanted, and whichever offer came first… if any… I was going to say yes.
I would only get one offer from the Bureau of Consular Affairs (CA), because the four SIP assignments I’d bid on were all consular jobs. CA streamlines its processes internally and deconflicts to select officers for each position and create teams. They don’t give you a choice: they give you one offer, or nothing. It isn’t like political bidding amongst different regional bureaus where you may get an offer from each.
In the week before handshake day, I was not only covering my busy international parental child abduction portfolio in the Office of Children’s Issues, but also backstopping a second portfolio due to a staffing gap in our team between FSOs.
Permanent Change of Station (PCS) season often leads to one officer rotating out of an assignment before their replacement is on board. Tie that in with everyone’s more frequent annual leave requests to take advantage of traveling during the summer school break and (hypothetical) nice weather, and you have the perfect recipe for an office being short-staffed as those who remain become double- and triple-hatted. Rinse, repeat as this happens all across overseas posts and domestic bureaus every summer. Rare is the year where we aren’t either bidding or PCSing.
Over the following days, in addition to my own work, I covered for the departing officer, her successor, another colleague who took some well-deserved leave, and my supervisor, the branch chief of our division. And then beginning this week, I actually did all that simultaneously.
But at least it was a short week due to the Fourth of July holiday on Tuesday, right?
Not so fast! My “day off” was spent on a 24-hour holiday shift as the global Overseas Citizen Services (OCS) duty officer for the Bureau of Consular Affairs, backstopping every duty officer in every embassy and consulate, worldwide.
What kind of things happen on an OCS duty shift? As I talked about recently in my post Consular Officers Have the Best Stories, Part I, everything from U.S citizens getting arrested or having medical emergencies overseas, to one parent abducting the children to a foreign country in violation of a court order. And I did deal with some of those issues on my shift.
Unfortunately, I also dealt with a Fourth of July emergency all of my own.
Shortly after 10 a.m. as I sat in my second-floor home office paying bills, refreshing my memory about duty handbook guidance, and willing the duty phone not to ring, I suddenly heard a tremendous crash right above me. It was followed by an awful metal scraping sound and then a second crash down in the driveway below.
My first irrational thought was that someone was on the roof. More like something. Without even looking, I then knew exactly what had happened. It was something V and I had both dreaded for the past year and a half.
I jumped up and looked out my office window, my mouth dropping open in dismay as I confirmed what I’d imagined. A gigantic, thick tree limb had fallen high from one of our front yard’s half dozen old-growth deciduous trees, hit the roof of the house above the garage, and then ended up on the hood of my Volkswagen!
It was a big one, and looked to have torn down some power lines in the process. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. It had just been two business days before that we’d notified our landlord, and not for the first time, that we needed a licensed arborist out at the house.
I ran out the front door to check the damage yelling that I’d known it and now here we were. My husband V was close behind and pulled the tree limb off my car before I could even take a picture. The hood of the Volkswagen featured a tree-sized dent and gash, and the front left headlight casing was shattered on the driveway.
The cable that stretched between the front of our house and the utility pole across the street was hanging down, draped low across the top of my car and so low across the street it would soon be impeding traffic. We live in a quiet neighborhood, but near its north entrance and in a relatively high-traffic area, as most of the traffic to get in and out of the neighborhood passes by.
Just then, as V and I watched, a work van with a ladder rack on top proceeded by our house from right to left trying to exit the neighborhood. The roof rack snagged the cable and pulled it, ripping the cables and the whole box clean off the house, severing some of the cables and sending the plastic door to the unit flying across our front walkway.
The van screeched to a halt in the middle of the street like a steer roped by a cowboy’s lasso, stuck on the too-low cable. I literally put my hand over my mouth and said, “Oh, no. Oh, no.” I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
The absurdity of the situation stretched on for a few hours. V and the guys in the van untangled the cable from the ladder rack. V and a neighbor blocked the street with our own ladder, an orange fluorescent triangle, and some garbage cans, and wrapped caution tape around it all to create a barrier over where the downed cable was. V directed traffic until the police arrived. Joggers, dog-walkers, and looky-loos stopped and stared. Cars approached, and then made U-turns and went another way.
The police and V spent a couple of hours calling utilities listed on the pole. V and I ranted about the unqualified person our landlord previously sent to trim the trees, who is a general handyman and had no idea what he was doing, trimming branches unevenly and making one tree tilt, while using his blower to disturb all of our mulch instead of cleaning up the mess he’d made. Dominion Energy finally came in the afternoon and cut the lines to get them out of the road so the police blocking off the street could leave.
But unfortunately, our internet was out and Verizon couldn’t respond until the following day. Since my work laptop was offline, I’d lost access to the consular platforms I’d need if I got a duty call that would require me to confirm U.S. citizenship or perform one of the many other functions a duty officer may be called to do, such as draft emergency alerts, distribute a message to U.S. citizens registered with the State Department while in a foreign country, work to clear talking points, look up a passport number, etc. With a pit in my stomach, I alerted our duty directors to my limited operability, but no one responded. Everyone but us was in sparklers-and-BBQ mode. (Cue eagle screech,)
I can do this with duct tape and a string, I thought. As long as it doesn’t go sideways. Fortunately, the matters I dealt with were not something I ended up needing to consult the complex, 100+ page duty handbook or any systems on, and I composed and emailed my duty report from a template on my phone. But it was a nerve-wracking day biding my time. I got very, very lucky and didn’t need to bother anyone else on our team to step in and take over.
I filed an insurance claim for the damage to my Volkswagen while texting my landlord, checking in with my husband, and trying to keep the duty phone with me at all times as I ran in and out of the house to take photos and video of the scene.
And I’m not the only one who had a weird day. I spoke to my mom, who had woken up to battle a sudden ant infestation in her immaculate kitchen. I spoke to my dad, who told me my stepmom, who has been very ill for the past year, had suddenly gone to the hospital. I stood at the window looking down at the Volkswagen I’d planned to drive cross-country days later. I had the insane urge to just leave and drive 3,000 miles to Washington where my dad and stepmom live, and leave all this work craziness behind.
The following morning, and still without wifi, I was trying to juggle taking a shower, emailing back and forth with my superiors to brief them on an ongoing duty issue that rose to the level of our Deputy Assistant Secretary (since the shift doesn’t end until 8:00 a.m.), and driving to DC before 9:00 a.m. for our weekly in-person day in the office.
I was also still acting for my boss, and trying to triage coverage when someone on our team messaged me they were ill and couldn’t come in. That person was already supposed to be covering for another person who was out, and I couldn’t see the work calendar I needed on my phone to figure out who was working vs. on leave. My email was starting to fill up with taskers to clear and messages about cases that weren’t mine but that I’d have to respond to. Hope you enjoyed the holiday! someone told me on Facebook.
Parallel to all this, some former Peace Corps colleagues were sending me WhatsApp messages about whether or not we were having a happy hour after work. The colleague who had recently rotated out of our office and is also a friend texted me to confirm our lunch that day.
I was trying not to get frayed over my attention being pulled in all these different directions. I just needed to get out the door to work. I eyeballed my damaged car and thought, I’m driving it anyway. But in the back of my mind, on top of everything else, I knew it was HANDSHAKE DAY!
It had been a crazy period preceding handshake day, but that hadn’t stopped me from daydreaming about the three posts we’d bid on.
Which one would it be? The post where I wouldn’t have to learn a language but where V would have to surrender his permanent Civil Service job for a temporary embassy job in order to accompany me, only to face being unemployed again in a year? Would it be the post where I’d get to learn another Slavic language and be nearer to V’s mom but confront daily news of missile attacks? Would it be a faraway land of golden temples where the work of four people was currently being covered by one? Or, would I not receive any handshake at all, and have to start all over again in September, barring a later LTTD offer?
Little did I know I was only minutes from finding out.
Collecting Postcards 
4 comments for “Fifth Tour Bidding: Before Handshake Day”