Tag: Hope

Foreign Service, Health, Leadership & Work Culture, U.S.

PN250: Core Skills for Mid-Level Officers

by pennypostcard • April 30, 2024 • 2 Comments

Two weeks ago I went “back to school,” attending a weeklong mid-level training focused on strategic decision-making at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). I hadn’t been on campus since March 2020, four months before we ultimately left for my third tour in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. An FSI leadership training had been the last scheduled course I’d managed to attend before Foreign Affairs Counterthreat Training (FACT) was cancelled due to COVID and we went into lockdown in our PCS Lodging apartment.

Four years later, in spring 2024, FSI looks both the same and somehow changed to me. Since I’ve been gone, construction has started – and finished – on the new B Building. The resultant space is modern and light-filled. Flowering trees and daffodils dot the landscape in pinks and yellows. Green grass lawns stretch like taut carpets, connecting the cafeteria to its adjacent counterpart structures and hosting the perfect place for jeans-clad students to read, eat, or throw a frisbee around.

But as I came back to FSI, I couldn’t help but think the bucolic scenery seemingly belied the terrible reality the world – and our workplace – have seen since 2020. However much things have changed and are now attempting to boomerang back, they can’t truly return to what they once were. Not for me. And yet here we are. Like all successful creatures, we adapt and keep going. This trial run going to FSI for a week was as much a test for me of my current logistical and life skills (and how ready I am for a year of a slow roller coaster that builds and builds) as it was the core skills the Department sought to impart through PN250.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture, U.S.

Diplomacy 1, Hacker 0… Part II

by pennypostcard • March 17, 2024 • 1 Comment

In my previous blog post, I began to tell the March 2023 story of how a hacker took over my Facebook account. If you missed it, I recommend reading Part I at the link before reading Part II. At the end of Part I, I’d left my tale of woe on a cliffhanger after reaching out to the hacker who had gained access to my Facebook account and locked me out.

The hacker had changed the phone number associated with my account before the primary email address. So I’d been notified via email of his real phone number. It had a Nigerian country code, and I’d found the number active on WhatsApp. The location data Facebook had sent me associated with the new primary phone number for my account indicated the hacker was in Southern California using an iPhone 6S. I wasn’t sure if he was actually in California or perhaps in Nigeria using a VPN to obfuscate his location. I was inclined to think the latter, given his iPhone was about eight generations behind. But at that point, it didn’t really matter in practical terms. He was in and I was out. I had fallen for a dumb scam thinking I was talking to a friend I’d known since 1999 when in fact, it was a total stranger.

Weighing the risk he might try and extort or blackmail me against the fact Facebook had locked down my account and he couldn’t see my personal info anyway, I decided to see what would happen if I contacted him directly.

Foreign Service, Travel, U.S.

Year in Review: 2023 Blog Stats and Recap

by pennypostcard • February 12, 2024 • 0 Comments

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.

Foreign Service, U.S.

Low Battery

by pennypostcard • December 31, 2023 • 3 Comments

There’s something about the coming of another new year that makes me want to create a resolution in the same way it makes other people want to opt out of participating. Tying goal-setting to an arbitrary date on the calendar may feel just that, like another push in the endless striving for us to be productive or needlessly trying harder to achieve some hypothetical better version of ourselves. Coming on the heels of the holidays it’s all laced with a particular flavor of consumerism, in case your holiday hangover wasn’t already painful enough. Buy more, do more, be more – often without considering what truly makes us happy and what we truly need.

Foreign Service, U.S.

File Under the Auspices of Accidental Chip on Shoulder

by pennypostcard • October 31, 2023 • 2 Comments

A few weeks ago, a friend I served with in the Peace Corps came to town on business, and we arranged to meet for a weeknight dinner in Washington, DC. We had a wonderful time talking about what’s going on in our lives presently and reminiscing about the nearly 21 years we’ve known each other. A small financial matter at the conclusion of our dinner prompted an unexpected exchange of insights on our different public handling of being charged for something we did not expect to pay for. Watching my friend’s proactive response and hearing his rationale made me realize my own behavior towards “bill shock” deserves further examination and recalibration.

Burma, Foreign Service, U.S.

The Land of the Golden Pagodas

by pennypostcard • September 6, 2023 • 3 Comments

Last week I was surprised by a housing questionnaire from my next post, Rangoon, welcoming us to “the land of the golden pagodas.” I think my surprise was because our arrival to said land is a year and 10 months away! I’ve never known a post to send a housing questionnaire so far in advance.

In comparison, I received our housing questionnaires for Tashkent, Canberra, and Ciudad Juárez four months, eight months, and nine months respectively prior to our scheduled arrivals. So our next post is clearly organized and thinking ahead (although when the Department releases the TMONE assignment cable necessary to confirm an officer has been paneled into a job and therefore will need a housing assignment is outside of post’s timing or control)! I immediately started to grin thinking of Burma’s beautiful pagodas that I’m so looking forward to seeing. However, it isn’t a pagoda we will be living in, but a house or apartment.

Burma, Foreign Service

Fifth Tour Bidding: Postscript, Paneling and Beyond

by pennypostcard • August 14, 2023 • 2 Comments

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.

Foreign Service

Fifth Tour Bidding: What Comes After a Handshake?

by pennypostcard • August 9, 2023 • 1 Comment

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.

Burma, Foreign Service, U.S.

Flag Day Announcement… V

by pennypostcard • July 7, 2023 • 6 Comments

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.

Foreign Service, U.S.

Fifth Tour Bidding: Before Handshake Day

by pennypostcard • July 6, 2023 • 4 Comments

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.

Foreign Service, Mexico

Foreign Service Housing, Part III

by pennypostcard • July 4, 2023 • 3 Comments

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.

Foreign Service, Mexico, U.S.

Foreign Service Housing, Part II

by pennypostcard • June 27, 2023 • 4 Comments

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.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture

Fifth Tour Bidding: Bids Are In

by pennypostcard • June 16, 2023 • 3 Comments

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.

Foreign Service, Leadership & Work Culture

Fifth Tour Bidding: The Early Assignments Cycle

by pennypostcard • May 16, 2023 • 7 Comments

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.

Foreign Service, U.S.

Don’t Blink or You’ll Miss It

by pennypostcard • April 25, 2023 • 1 Comment

While serving an overseas tour, you will have unusual experiences and adventures unique to your country or region of assignment. In the meantime, life continues for your family and friends half a world away in the United States. And once you come home to serve a domestic tour, you too get to enjoy all those people, places, and conveniences you missed. You soon settle into the familiar and relish in all that’s just easier. But every once in a while, you might get a bittersweet pang of FOMO thinking about the novelties you’d be enjoying if you were elsewhere. Or, homesickness may creep in for a faraway land that’s no longer your home.

My unsolicited advice, wherever you are, is to avoid looking across the fence to see if the grass is greener on the other side. There may not even be grass, so incomparable are the chapters of our lives one to another, and so starkly delineated by overseas moves. I think the trick is to enjoy each experience maximally for whatever it is before it’s time to change everything – house, job, cars, life – once again.

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