As a result of my Special Incentive Post (SIP) bidding efforts, on July 5 I was offered (and accepted) a handshake on our next diplomatic assignment to U.S. Embassy Rangoon in Burma.
However, I reserved a little corner of my mind for disappointment. After a handshake, a number of administrative things would still have to fall into place before the job would feel safely “mine.” Now more than one month later, we are getting very close to that point.
A couple of weeks ago, my husband V and I drove from Virginia out to Washington state to see my dad and stepmom. My stepmom has been ill and we wanted to spend some time with her and help out my dad. My brother C and my stepbrother J with his family were also planning to be there. Although this was my fourth cross-country trip to the west coast and back in the last 13 months, it was the first one where I didn’t go alone.
As the African proverb from which I borrowed the title of this post tells us, we can get somewhere fastest on a schedule that doesn’t account for the needs of any other travelers, but going the distance often requires more support. Although I have proven with my last year of solo road trips that I can go both fast and far alone, I can also acknowledge there have been plenty of times when having another driver and companion would’ve made the trip more enjoyable (and less worry-inducing for my parents?). And I certainly experienced that on this trip.
On July 5, handshake day dawned as I was having a somewhat frantic morning. Between juggling the end of my 24-hour Overseas Citizen Services duty officer shift and the requisite duty report, acting for my boss, dealing with the lack of wifi connectivity in our house, and fretting over my damaged car out in the driveway with a fallen tree limb laying next to it, I was distracted. I was aware a bidder handshake could hit my phone anytime, and that at least one post had short-listed me. However, I was slightly more focused on trying to get out the door to work in DC and be responsive to emails about a duty issue that had caught the attention of our front office.
And then, somewhere between trying to curl my hair and looking too hard at my eyebrows in the mirror, I glanced down at my iPhone balanced on the edge of the pedestal sink and saw the offer pop up.
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.
In Foreign Service Housing, I wrote about the embassy homes where we lived during our first two diplomatic tours in Uzbekistan and Australia, respectively. I later wrote about the PCS Lodging apartment where we lived in Arlington while I studied Spanish ahead of our third tour in Mexico in Foreign Service Housing, Part II. Even though we left Mexico a year and a half ago, I want to finally write about the good, the bad, and the ugly of our house in Ciudad Juárez. I probably have avoided this topic at least in part because thinking about everything that happened with the house brings back negative memories for me. Astute readers may have picked up on my ambivalence (at best) the day we left. But in the interest of sharing my honest perspective, I’m going to try.
I had found it difficult in the past to relate to people who I perceived to be… overly critical about their diplomatic housing. After all, it doesn’t cost us anything and is a useful benefit of our employment. Two stints on housing boards over my first four years in the service gave me the impression some people will complain about anything and everything, like the person who demanded the embassy pay for and install a bay window in her kitchen or she would request a move, or another who refused to come to post with her husband because they were assigned a house she said was not possible to fung shui. Whether or not I thought these requests were reasonable was one thing; the fact we had such limited latitude to make people happy was another. I decided to be happy in my homes even though things were not perfect. On balance, there was far more good than bad. But it wasn’t until my tour in Juárez and the nuances of being truly unhappy in a house, that I realized firsthand some circumstances warrant complaining.
When I joined the Foreign Service as a consular officer, future colleagues said to me, “Oh, consular officers have the best stories!”
“Oh yeah?” I smiled.
“Sure. Between the visa fraud, emergency passports, natural disasters, and American citizens getting arrested overseas, there’s no shortage of stories. I once visited this U.S. citizen in jail, you wouldn’t believe what happened with this guy…”
Oh boy, I thought. Tell me. I can’t wait.
One of the most popular and widely-read posts I’ve ever published to this blog is the prequel to this post, Foreign Service Housing. If you haven’t checked it out, please do! There I shared photos and stories about our housing assignments during our first two diplomatic postings to Tashkent, Uzbekistan (2015-2017) and Canberra, Australia (2017-2019). I published the post over four years ago in May 2019, and it’s already been viewed over 6,100 times. What this tells me is people are very interested to see where FSOs live. I can tell you the fascination and curiosity about housing is the same even after you’re in the Foreign Service, too!
I have been meaning for literally a couple of years now to write a follow-up to that article, because since then, we’ve also been assigned to domestic Permanent Change of Station (PCS) Lodging during long-term Spanish language training in Arlington, Virginia (2019-2020) and to a consulate house for my tour in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico (2020-2022).
We had more issues with each of those housing assignments than we’d ever had in Tashkent or Canberra, so perhaps I’ve delayed writing this post to avoid some of the bad memories. However, I’ve always strived in this blog to be as honest and balanced as possible about my experiences as an FSO, and I think it’s time to talk about housing when things aren’t as awesome. So let’s do it.
People are typically surprised to hear I’ve driven from the east coast to the west coast and back alone not just once, but three times during the last 12 months. I suppose it is surprising given the distance, sometimes even to me. Of course, there are times flying to one’s destination makes the most sense. After all, I’ve lived abroad five times and until the pandemic, flew on planes like it was my job. But I absolutely LOVE driving. In 2022 I took six major solo-driver road trips, totaling a whopping 22,127 miles. I’ve continued that trend in March 2023 with my biggest solo cross-country trip yet: a personal record of 7,963 miles. Not only did I take the scenic route behind the wheel as sole driver, on five of the seven trips I was also totally alone.
Although solo road trips are something I deeply enjoy, I recognize the inherent risk. I don’t necessarily recommend someone “endurance drive” if they feel it it’s a bad idea for them. Many people have told me driving all day is boring or makes them sleepy. Since I was a teenager, I’ve been taking five-hour road trips alone and have almost never felt this way. While there are plenty of things in life I find hard to do, driving for long periods isn’t one of them. But to whatever extent it is or isn’t your thing, there are ways to make it easier. Whether a cross-country solo road trip sounds like fun or slightly insane to contemplate, in order to answer the questions I keep getting about how I do this… here in no particular order are my top 25 tips for road tripping as safely as possible in the United States, especially if I go alone.
I have been doing better at keeping up with blog email and generating Your Questions Answered posts, publishing the latest edition just a month ago. In this edition, I will talk about becoming an FSO in your late 40s, the medical clearance process and whether there is a physical fitness requirement, the difference between generalists and specialists, concerns about how the FS lifestyle can affect families and children, and the high cost of living in DC during a domestic assignment.
As always, the answers to these questions are my personal views and don’t necessarily constitute policy or the views of the Department. You get what you pay for – and this is all free! Enjoy, and feel free to send your own questions to askcollectingpostcards@gmail.com. I will answer questions directly first, and maybe later publish them (always anonymously and without attribution) on the blog. If I owe you an answer, it’s still coming – I promise!
The first day of summer arrived earlier this week and brought oppressive humidity and rainstorms to the DC metro area. Fortunately, my mom had planned her recent 10-day visit to see us right before spring officially ended, and we had plenty of near-perfect weather to enjoy the fun activities this area offers in spring. Although both V and I were too busy at work to really take time off, and I was in the middle of SIP bidding, I can’t say the days at home were boring! They were more for recovery, as we packed in plenty of fun non-working hour events and made new memories with my mom. I shared with her my dad’s joke from his 2018 visit with my stepmom to us in Australia: “I’m going to have to leave your place in an ambulance.” She laughed because we still have limited chill when it comes to entertaining visitors.
Her visit was also a good reminder to us both to better embrace the touristy benefits of being posted to DC for a domestic tour.
The summer 2024 early assignments bid cycle is drawing to a close, with Special Incentive Post (SIP) bids due today and domestic Long-Term Training and Development (LTTD) bids due right after the holiday weekend.
My statements of interest are in. Lobbying, consultations, and interviews all completed. I’ve entered less than half a dozen bids into all the right platforms and rank-ordered them, and I’ve drafted thank you notes for references and interviewers. There’s no action for me other than to see what happens, and that feels pretty good. We’ve now arrived at my favorite part of the bidding season: the part where I don’t need to do any more work, and am free to anticipate the possibility of any of my bids materializing into a handshake.
Last month, my husband V and I took a few days off and connected them to a weekend, heading to a five-day beach house rental on North Carolina’s Carolina Beach and kicking off the first of many fun summer plans. I (inadvertently) got a scorching sunburn, fell asleep each humid night hearing the waves of the Atlantic Ocean crash into the sandy shore, saw a record two dozen pelicans at once, ate lots of good food, and even saw my favorite band. The weather was a little stormier than I’d expected, but we had about a day and a half of good beach time without a chilly wind. And the best thing: downtime with V where we didn’t have to think about work.
As I mentioned in my previous post previewing bidding strategies for my upcoming fifth tour, the regular bid season won’t officially get underway until early autumn. But there are some aspects of bidding that start sooner – besides anxiety, networking, and planning – that I didn’t mention. Two of those aspects make up what we call the “early assignments cycle.”
I’m referring to Special Incentive Post (SIP) bidding and Long-Term Training and Detail (LTTD) bidding. The SIP and LTTD bid cycles are abbreviated, occurring before the regular bid cycle so the Department can quickly lock in handshakes for jobs at its highest-priority or most difficult-to-staff posts, as well as external detail and academic positions, respectively, a few months before regular bidding begins. If you receive an SIP or LTTD assignment, your bidding is done and you can watch everyone else sweat it out!
I don’t have a lot of experience with either SIPs or LTTDs. I tried to bid SIP posts from Australia during third tour bidding in 2018, but as an untenured second tour officer bidding mid-level for the first time, the experience was so unsuccessful and short-lived I don’t think I even mentioned it on the blog. And last time I bid in 2021 I didn’t really understand what LTTDs were; most of them were offered above my rank at that time. Finding out about how LTTDs work now has been a little like discovering a hidden level of a video game I thought I’d already scoped out and understood.
This time around I plan to throw my hat in the ring for both SIP and LTTD jobs. This isn’t because I don’t want any jobs in the regular bid cycle – much to the contrary, I have my eye seriously on at least a dozen of the projected vacancies! I just want to try something new and see what happens. I’ve learned a long time ago in the Foreign Service not to self-adjudicate out of opportunities. Maybe SIP or LTTD will work out and maybe they won’t, but in the meantime, here are some of my unofficial, bidder perspectives on the process. A note that none of the information in this post is intended to constitute instructions or policy.
I can’t believe it has been two years since the last time I wrote a YQA post! I have certainly answered many emailed questions to the blog since then, so I’m eager to share some of them in the hopes it might answer a question you have about the Foreign Service.
In this post I will address how prepared I felt for my first diplomatic tour and why, my policy on Zoom calls with prospective FSO candidates, what in my background led me to the FS, a link to my candidacy study tips, my views on how stressful this career is, how I think high school students could prepare for the Foreign Service, and the book I read about this career that inspired me.
In a future volume of YQA, I will focus on questions about how the Foreign Service lifestyle affects an officer’s family members.
Over Easter weekend in early April, V and I went to the Festival of Spring at Burnside Farms in Nokesville, Virginia. Located less than 90 minutes from our home in Alexandria, the farm has planted 70 acres of tulips and daffodils every spring since 2012. Tickets can be difficult to come by, as peak bloom is unpredictable and most of the short three-week season’s tickets are snapped up as soon as they are announced. Other than a summer sunflower festival and Christmas tree farm sales in winter, Burnside Farms is more or less closed to the public.
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