In 2023, I met my goal of writing fewer words more often. I published 40 posts, several on Foreign Service-related topics. I wrote a series on bidding for and receiving my fifth assignment. I expanded a popular post about FS Housing into a series. I also wrote two new installments of ‘Your Questions Answered.’ In what turned out to be a very road trip and family-oriented year, I made four trips to the west coast and back – three by car – and my mom and dad each visited us on the east coast. In 2022, I’d received a promotion, meaning I wouldn’t be eligible to be promoted again for two years; I enjoyed the professional sweet spot where I didn’t have to PCS, learn a new job, or compete for promotion. The year ended on a sad note: my family faced the death of my stepmother and learned the hard way about the limitations of the Medicare-funded hospice program in the United States.
Tag: Handshake
Fifth Tour Bidding: Postscript, Paneling and Beyond
In my growing file of Foreign Service-related “All’s well that ends well” scenarios, I had no sooner hit the publish button on my previous post about waiting to be paneled into the job for which I received my SIP handshake in July before the Department notified me my paneling had been completed.
And thus my fifth tour bidding experience came to a close – all before the regular bid season even starts in September.
Fifth Tour Bidding: What Comes After a Handshake?
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.
Flag Day Announcement… V
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.
Fifth Tour Bidding: Before Handshake Day
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.
Flag Day Announcement… IV
Monday, November 1 was Handshake Day for the Summer 2022 bid cycle. My handshake email came early in the morning and was not a total surprise to me. The Bureau of Consular Affairs had sent me an email on October 25 to tell me I was the Bureau Leading Candidate, or BLC, for the position and inquire whether it was still a valid bid for me. It was. I was very interested in the work and had interviewed for the position twice, including once from my family vacation at the Iberostar (on my birthday, unbeknownst to the interviewer!). None of my political coned bids had ultimately gone to the final stage, so I wasn’t expecting further BLCs. CA wasn’t going to offer me more than one choice, so it had come down to this. V and I discussed all of the implications and decided, as we had when we’d decided to bid jobs in that area, that we could make it work.
Flag Day Announcement… III
I remember the afternoon in August 2014 that I got my flag for Uzbekistan, surrounded by my cheering A-100 colleagues. And I also remember the hot summer evening in June 2016 when I received my second tour assignment to Australia and stood bolt upright in my Uzbek wallpapered living room.
And very early this morning, I had that moment again. I checked my work BlackBerry and saw an email with the subject line “Handshake.” I actually waited almost 30 seconds to click on it, fumbling for my glasses and barely breathing.
Collecting Postcards 