An End of Tour First…

…At least, for me. I am about three weeks away from finishing my fourth tour in the Office of Children’s Issues in Washington. I’m in a busy period of time at work. But it hasn’t escaped me that at this point during every prior tour, I was working and buried in preparations for Permanent Change of Station (PCS) moves.

By comparison, my to-do list now – while never finished – seems manageable. I do have some trepidation about going into 13 months of full-time training, particularly 10 months of Burmese language class. Going from 60% remote to 100% in-person will pose challenges too – logistical, mental, and personal. But for the time being, I’m grateful to wrap up a tour for the first time without the stress of an overseas PCS move looming days away.

In the spring of 2017, the month before we left Tashkent, I had plenty to do to close down our life in Uzbekistan. I was scheduling our packout and arranging to cram in as much during my training in Washington followed by our west coast home leave as possible.

I’d needed to make an appointment to update my expiring employee badge, confirm my training enrollments at FSI and our temporary lodging nearby, and ensure our onward Australian visas were done and dusted. Plus somehow fitting a slew of medical appointments with my DC providers around the POL/ECON tradecraft I needed for my onward assignment. Then off to California, where during home leave, we had plans to go to Seattle, to Disneyland, to Reno. Plenty to organize!

Before leaving Tashkent, I planned a yard sale, a goodbye party. I picked up our medical records from the embassy, got a TB skin test, arranged mail forwarding, and updated our household inventory and insurance policies.

I fretted over not knowing whether we’d be in a house or an apartment in Canberra, as we sorted our household effects into carry-on and checked suitcases, and piles destined for air freight, sea freight, giveaway, use-up, sell, and storage. It all felt never-ending. On top of that, upon our departure, my husband V’s job (and paycheck) were about to vanish into thin air.

The Secretary of State at that time had instituted a Department-wide freeze on hiring Eligible Family Members (EFMs). This meant any officer’s spouse working in an embassy would lose their job upon transferring during the 2017 PCS season and be ineligible to be hired into any vacant position once arriving at their new embassy. Not that EFMs are entitled to embassy jobs. They have to apply and qualify. But to be told there was no chance to even apply was a total gobsmacker. Turns out, the Aussies wouldn’t get it or be too keen to hire people the Americans “didn’t want” either.

So on top of the stress of V’s break in federal service and our dual-income family dropping down to one income for the first time in our then-11 years together, we didn’t even know how long the EFM hiring freeze would last.

(It lasted about a year. Luckily the first few months of it V was still working in Tashkent, and some of the months in Australia he managed to get a casual job on the economy before eventually getting hired on in the embassy’s public affairs section. Read this really excellent Foreign Policy article about why it lasted so long, and how the freeze damaged morale and efficiency through the Department globally.

Then go read this blog post by my friend and former colleague, who is also an EFM. It simply remains the most brilliant takedown of the hiring freeze I’ve ever read, and is not to be missed. That was all such a terrible period in our lives, and added a lot of stress to our first PCS.)

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Preparing to PCS from Canberra two years later was its own special kind of hell. I think because Australia is a developed, English-speaking country, we had become quickly and deeply rooted there. That happened in many ways, and administratively too. We had cell phone, television, and internet service to cancel; in Tashkent the embassy had handled this. We had fitness club memberships to cancel, and toll road transponder tags from our vehicles to shut down and send back.

We had checking and savings accounts to close and green waste disposal service to cancel. We had two Australian cars to service, clear off the diplomatic registration for, and sell, for crying out loud, including the biggest lemon car of all time.

It was as heavy a lift as taking apart your life in the United States. In Tashkent my car had simply been picked up from the embassy parking lot and taken to storage. All we’d done is hug her goodbye and take a couple photos on our last night in-country. (Easy to do, but ultimately a terrible decision – don’t get me started on the clown show of storing my car under the auspices of the U.S. Government. Two words: never again.)

I worked for weeks on planning, organizing, and booking our home leave activities across Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington. I sold fitness equipment, and gave away bags of clothes and household goods. We took old chemicals and car batteries from our garage to the approved hazardous waste collection site. We had a yard sale. We had to collect our medical records from not only the embassy, but from all over the Australian Capital Territory and New South Wales. Because of course, we saw various medical and dental providers while living there and didn’t want to leave our files behind.

We were both working 50-60 hours a week and had a busy travel and social schedule. It took me months to finish everything. Maybe I dragged my feet a little (?) because it was sad. We loved being there, despite the more-frantic-than-expected work pace.

It was so stressful that the last morning before we went to the airport, we had our beloved Australian neighbors come and raid our fridge and take every last thing left inside. That was just after we’d eaten breakfast on our old chipped dishware from Kohl’s that we’d had for a decade. Afterward we threw the whole set of plates and bowls we’d skipped packing out into the rubbish bin with a tremendous crash. What a weird life, I’d thought.

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The PCS before we left Ciudad Juárez just under three years later was unique. On the one hand, I’d only made the decision to curtail several weeks out from when we ended up leaving. (Some curtailments are so fast the officer doesn’t even pack themselves. Mine wasn’t like that, by design.)

I had initially extended our two-year tour to three years upon arriving at post. As I better understood the working environment and experienced increasing toxicity, several months later I worked with Washington to retract the third year. I got paneled back into a two-year tour, surrendering my Service Need Differential.

If that weren’t a big enough memo, curtailment rather than staying another six months was my hard no to the treatment I received of being ostracized, put at risk, and left to fend for myself. More importantly, it was an affirmation to myself that all the different toxic workplaces I’ve silently put up with during my career have been wrong and I’m done with all of it. Especially being penalized for speaking up about things that are wrong. Done, done, and done.

In a practical sense, it meant our PCS timeline was hastily accelerated, and right at the holidays. On the other hand, I was beyond caring. I was too busy sorting and packing (and covering for my boss’s leave the second consecutive Christmas) to cook or put up a tree. I was very relieved our UAB (air freight) would be supplemented by all we could pack into our two SUVs and drive across the border.

Because we were driving to Virginia and could bring our valuables rather than fret about hiding them in the shipment or trying to wrestle with them (and our brand new semi-feral cat!) on a commercial flight, it was a relief. At that time, I was ill and trying to deal with special eating requirements, the loss of most of my hair, and an absurd amount of work and personal stress. I was very happy to finish with my all my to-do lists and the packout and to finally say goodbye to what ended up being a valuable tour in some ways but also a bitterly disappointing and unfairly financially punitive one.

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As I remember preparing to leave those three tours, I see the differences and similarities in each PCS. It also reminds me again how different leaving Children’s Issues will be. Wrapping up a 60% remote DC tour and going into 13 months of solid in-person training at FSI until we PCS to our fifth tour in Burma will usher in a new routine for me.

And instead of a chaotic lead-up to our PCS followed by a “#,### Miles Later” blog post about how we can’t find our socks and outlining unexpected settling-in shocks, 2024 will be a much different type of summer. It will be a time of tradecraft and adjustment before I buckle down into the long haul of Burmese language class in September, which I’ll ride all the way until next July when we leave.

Probably the closest equivalent I have is leaving my job at Peace Corps HQ in June 2014 to start A-100 as a local hire, and then transitioning into Russian after Labor Day. Whereas many of my classmates moved across the country (or the world) to join A-100, their spouses left jobs, their kids changed schools, they packed up their homes, sold cars, and completely changed their routines, all I did was go from DC to Arlington. Same, same.

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I’m trying to keep this perspective in mind. I’ve had a growing awareness over the past several years about work-life balance and needing to manage chronic fatigue. I’m still a bit of a workhorse but at least not as bad as I was.

Yet even I am wondering – not how or if I will manage the transition back to needing to be at a certain place at a very specific time daily – but at what cost. How mentally and physically expensive will it be for me to be on someone else’s schedule every day, day in and day out. To have to get dressed every day when I’m used to staying up late and getting up late and working in my fitness apparel. And when I’m also the kind of person who doesn’t leave the house for work without taking a lot of time and effort to put myself together. To not be able to take a neighborhood walk at lunchtime because I’m not at home. To drive in the idiocy of northern VA traffic for 10+ hours a week at rush hour, which has gone from lunacy to something near lawlessness.

Lest this sound like whining, don’t forget – I’m Gen X and spent 25 years in work and academic environments pre-pandemic. So I know very well – TOO well – how things are and have been. So well in fact that I often question if we know what we’re doing. We didn’t with “return to work.” And I’m not sure “return to office” is more sophisticated.

It’s harder to argue the hybrid environment works in the training context. At least for me, it often falls victim to multi-tasking. Suddenly I realize I’m not absorbing anything the way I would were I in the room and accountable to hold still and pay attention.

Alternatively, the second day each week I have to drive into DC now and work in an empty building (at the cost of $24 parking, plus gas and lunch, and two hours of roundtrip commute, all of which I subsidize against the rest of my life). I like seeing my colleagues, but the reality is I often don’t, and I could do the exact same thing from home.

It’s a clear signal we have not yet figured out the office as “a place we used to go” vs. a collaborative space to leverage the power of the collective’s skills when the job doesn’t need to be done from there. Working quietly in a sterile office, wearing certain clothes and having gone through significant effort to get there, but just being alone, or worse, being distracted by chatter and other annoyances, makes you understand there’s been a paradigm shift. For knowledge workers with the right equipment and connectivity who need to leave the office and go home just to get their work done, “the office” is already wherever they need it to be. What’s the value-add of coming in? Could there be more face-to-face engagement or restructuring of shared duties to coincide with days everyone is in? Not “forced fun” or ancillary team-building we wouldn’t otherwise do, but a real attempt to collaborate on the work to make what we do more efficient while also building morale, solving problems, and streamlining workflows?

The whole butts-in-seats thing is infantilizing and also over, and the industries that don’t get it will just keep losing talent. The people who weren’t doing their jobs pre-pandemic went home and proceeded to continue not doing their jobs. When and if they return to the office, same same. It’s a failure of management and supervision issue, not a remote work issue.

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So in the sense that I am transitioning from a very independently-focused job where most of my work is self-directed and autonomous, and I’m going into a classroom environment this summer, I’m looking forward to being in that learning space again.