Unannounced 132nd Specialist Class Reunion at FSI

You know, I think I may have been the only person from the 132nd specialist class to even bother showing up for the reunion at FSI on Monday. Of course... it was unofficial... and unannounced... and... uh... made up by  me. BUT COME ON FOLKS!

Joking aside, walking the halls of the Foreign Service Institute... running into people I met on the other side of the world, I guess this makes me a true Foreign Service Officer. I scheduled some time on my R&R to stop by and see some of my (departed) friends from Chennai who were in training (or working) there. It was neat to be back, albeit briefly (and unofficially). I think that's one of the experiences (for better or worse) that IMS miss out on: extended periods at FSI. We don't tend to get language training, which tends to be the longest training, so we spend less overall time between posts. Similarly, we seem to get more funding for mid-tour training than many of our counterparts (at least at this post).

PS: That's a picture of Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean.

Scary to visit America

This is a post I drafted while at FSI, but never managed to finish / post.

We've heard from several of the instructors that America is considered a scary/dangerous place to visit. Kind of the way we (Americans) joke that "EVERYTHING IN AUSTRALIA CAN AND WILL KILL YOU." However, unlike Australia where this is in fact true, the United States is relatively safe, right?

Well... it depends on how you look at it. Hurricanes, Tornados, Earthquakes, Volcanos, Floods, Landslides, Blizzards, Firestorms, Rattlesnakes, Alligators, Bears, Mountain Lions, Black Widows (albeit non-fatal, they still are often mistaken as such), and Crime are all in the news and in movies. Let's face it, that media exposure is how most people form their opinion of the US. Plus, I think most people who have never been to the United States don't really grasp how big it is (like us regarding Africa). They live in relatively small, geographically homogenous countries and therefore may not internalize the sheer size of the US. Even the Aussies, plan like one week to see the entire US and they live in a huge country as well, albeit sparsely populated (though to be fair, I only spent two weeks visiting Australia).  If you condense all of the US's various dangers into one place, say one state... I could see how that'd be pretty terrifying.

I bring this up because I was recently sitting next to an LES from Morocco in the breakroom while the news reported on a sinkhole in Baltimore that swallowed some (empty) cars. No one was hurt, but the guy I was talking to was pretty shaken up about it. He said he has the opportunity to move to the US soon, but he's not sure he'll take it. Apparently he wants to come, but the US is a "dangerous place." He then proceeded to list off a bunch of the dangers I mentioned above. I explained that only some of those apply to any one place you live. He didn't seem to convinced and said he never has to worry about any of those things in Morocco (though I've later learned that Morocco does in fact get some floods, earthquakes, and insect swarms...). In the end, we didn't talk long, but I was surprised to find out that our instructors weren't just pulling our legs about the "scary America" idea.

Take that Europe! Even your map distortion can't save you!

Ok, Ok, you win Africa.

There's a neat website where you can compare country sizes, aptly named OverlapMaps.com.

Pre-Departure Stress

It’s the day before we leave and all the stress of the move is coming to a head. Today was my last day at FSI and the Basic EMT class was pretty interesting. I went through the “departure from FSI checklist” and headed out to pick up my wife and son from the Smithsonian, where they’d spent the day. I dropped off one of my classmates at his apartment, and during the ride we noticed that the rental car’s AC had stopped working. Bummer, I thought, but I’ll be returning it tomorrow anyway. Turns out, I was wrong. A couple blocks after dropping him off, the car completely stopped responding to the gas petal. It would idle, but wouldn’t accelerate any more than that. Fortunately, since it was still moving, I was able to pull out of traffic to a side road. Unfortunately, it was insanely hot, and it took a little over an hour for the tow truck to come get me. Another hour later and I had a new (upgraded) car from Alamo and had somehow skipped out on paying for most of a tank of gas. Probably not worth the time in the sauna… but I guess it's good practice.

Anyway, my wife and son had made their way to a friend’s house on the metro, so I headed over there. We had a pleasant dinner talking about how excited we were to get to India, and how insanely nervous we were about not yet having the paperwork from the Government of India (GOI) regarding importing our cats. With one business day left to get it, we were certainly cutting things close.

I should mention here that the import paperwork is submitted (and generally taken care of) by one of the people in Shipping at the consulate. Without his hard work, this process would have been incredibly more difficult. It was definitely not his fault that things were coming down to the wire. Instead, I blame the USDA. The GOI requires 5 business days to process pet import applications. However, the USDA will not allow the pet to be certified for export until 10 calendar days before departure. Since you have to get your local vet to sign off, and then mail (FEDEX overnight) the paperwork to the USDA regional office (Richmond for us), the process is almost guaranteed to induce heartburn.

Oh well, 48 hours from now we’ll be in India!

Graduation Day

Graduation day! I would never add music to any webpage, but you can try to imagine a Pomp and Circumstance March in the background while you read this. 14:00 found us sitting in the Wood Lobby at FSI. After a couple of speeches, one by Tin Cao (Assistant Dean of the School of Applied Information Technology (SAIT)) and one by Steven Taylor (CIO for the State Department), we were called out one by one and received our certificates. It was very reminiscent of college graduation, except with way fewer people. Our certificate included a copy of the class picture we took during IRM Tradecraft and the certificate posted above. It was a short, but pleasant, ceremony followed by another group photo, general congratulations and mixing with our instructors.

Every IMS class has one student that is voted for by the instructors and other students to be the "distinguished honor graduate," and I was surprised and incredibly flattered to be chosen for my class. Fortunately, I had spent no time preparing myself for such an honor, so I was woefully unprepared when my classmates called for a speech. I'm not much of an orator, but I would like to repeat part of what I said in my (very brief) impromptu speech.

I realized earlier this week that our time, as a full class, at FSI is quickly coming to a close. This really bummed me out, because I've spent the last four months meeting and befriending people that I'll shortly be thousands of miles away from. I knew when I signed up for this job that I'd be constantly shifting around, resulting in a constant change of coworkers, but this is the first time it's really hit me that I might possibly never work with any of the people in my class again. Of course we'll keep in touch, but I will definitely miss working with all my friends who have shared the start of this new life adventure with me. In that respect, I'm very glad to have been a part of such an abnormally large IMS class, since my chances of seeing my fellow new hires again is much greater when there are 23 of us, compared to the standard 6-12.

Congratulations IMSers of the 132nd Specialist Class!

Week 14 of Training: SIMOPS Continued

Today marked the end of an era. "What era?," you might ask. Why the era of the IMS core training for the Foreign Service 132nd Specialist Class. Yeah, I guess that is oddly specific for an era. Anyway, we finished up our last day of SIMOPS today. This is a mixed blessing. On the plus side, we're that much closer to going overseas. On the minus side, we have no excuse if we're awful at our jobs... I'm kidding of course, there's always an excuse.

The rest of the week was pretty standard. We had two days of 'open scheduling' when we could spend time with any of our instructors, if we wanted/needed extra training. The other two days we spent furiously trying to remember things we'd learned weeks and months ago. The whole process was pretty relaxed, so I'd hesitate to call it a "final" for our training, but we did brush on everything we'd learned. Tomorrow is mostly a day off; there will be a graduation ceremony for us in the afternoon, followed by some socializing.

For me, today marks my last day battling traffic to arrive at FSI before our 9am start time. Tomorrow I'll leave well after traffic has cleared up, and my last few weeks are full of consultation days and class at Main State. I can't say I'll miss the 2 - 4 hours a day of mind numbing traffic. I was fortunate to receive a parting gift from the commute though: when I went to change my destination in the WAZE navigation app, I received a ticket for texting while driving. That seemed fitting for my last day.

Week 13 of Training: SIMOPS

The end is in sight! This week we started the 'Simulated Operations' portion of training. SIMOPS is a two week capstone that reiterates everything we've learned, to make sure we're prepared to hit the ground running at post. Of course it doesn't cover managing Locally Employed Staff (LE Staff, formerly known as Foreign Service Nationals, or FSNs), which is pretty much the only part I'm nervous about. Oh well.

I was surprised to find out on the first day, that we actually had new material to cover. My portion of our class (we were once again split up on account of our unusual size), started the week by taking the two-day course "Classified Equipment Lifecycle Management." I'll include the excerpt from the FSI catalog so that I can really drive home how boring this class sounded.

"Training program provides students an insight to Classified Equipment Lifecycle Management (CELM) with specific emphasis on the destruction of obsolete TEMPEST equipment. Additional topics include the..." 
Blah, blah, blah. What that translated into was... taking things apart and then (more importantly) hitting them with a hammer! Essentially, it was every IT professional's dream. I wish I could say it was similar to the printer scene in Office Space, but that'd be a bit of an exaggeration.

After CELM, we spent a day running scenarios based on the DoS Applied Systems class, and finished the week by practicing terminating cables (and by terminating, I mean putting ends on, not ending the lives of). Friday was also the School of Applied Information Technology's (SAIT) summer potluck, so we spent a slightly extended lunch mixing with each other, our instructors, and the management for our little piece of FSI.

Note: The President was not in fact in our SIMOPS... Also, we don't wear suits anymore... Oh yeah, and that room is way nicer than ours!

Week 10 of Training: Local Emergency and Evacuation Network VHF/UHF

Another week, another class down. This week we learned about Very High Frequency (VHF) and Ultra High Frequency (UHF) radios. This is the range of frequencies used by cell phones and broadcast radio stations, but for our purposes are used for local communications (e.g. motor pool cars or radios used to communicate if the infrastructure in the host city goes belly up during an emergency). The FSI catalog describes the class as: 

"This course will train the Department's Information Resources Management operational and maintenance personnel in the operation programming, installation, and maintenance of VHF/UHF and Repeater deployed wireless systems overseas."

That's a pretty decent description of the learning aspects of the class. What it doesn't describe is the 'kid-in-a-candy-shop' atmosphere of a bunch of adults (I think...) playing with what, for all intents and purposes, were giant walkie-talkies in the classroom. Part of this was because the instructor was quite entertaining and part was because the course material (at the depth we were going) wasn't incredibly difficult, but either way, we had a good time. Oh yeah, and everyone passed, so we couldn't have been goofing off too much! 

PS: The picture is of a (mostly) unidirectional yagi antenna. 

Week 9 of Training: FAST Backup Communications

I should start off by saying, while this is the course title pulled from the FSI catalog, I think they called it something else when we were in it. Anyway, this week was fairly general, if still important. We touched on the organization of Information Resource Management at post (the various position titles and their functions), processing the Diplomatic Pouch, how to destroy things at post and some basic security principals. Sadly there was a lot of review in this class from things we'd learned in previous classes. I think this is because these classes are all offered individually, not exclusively in our core training.

Anyway, we did get another field trip to break up the week and we got to learn how to smash computer-y things! What could be better than that?! A brief note on the picture: This actually isn't considered effective for destroying a hard drive... you have to degauss it first. Of course, I wouldn't want to do this to my own hard drives and expect to be able to recover anything worthwhile.

Weeks 6 - 8 of Training: Department of State Applied Systems

Welp, this week winds up the longest of our classes. DoS Applied Systems is, as far as I can tell, a fancy name for "Windows Essentials at Post." Our instructors said that, in the past, the requirement for passing this class was tied to successfully receiving a Microsoft certificate. However, since then they've moved to in-house testing and, to some extent, watered down the Microsoft focus with Department specific best practices. Unfortunately for those of us who have moderate to extensive experience administering an active directory Windows domain... this class was painful. The instructors were fantastic (and very funny!), but it's hard to sit through a class you could be teaching and maintain an appearance of polite interest. Fortunately, the instructors were aware of this, and very willing to turn a blind eye to off-topic internet surfing. 

That's not to say that the course wasn't worthwhile, despite my relatively firm grasp of the Windows material, I did learn some things specific to the Department (such as naming schema and how post transfers work). Also, many of my colleagues with less technical backgrounds found the class quite intimidating. It consisted of Windows administration instruction (tailored to the DoS), practical labs, guest speakers from assorted support groups, and field trips. The guest speakers were well chosen, and I was once again surprised by the shear scale of the Foreign Service. I've seen the gross numbers several times, but they often don't include contractors... and numbers just don't have the same wow factor as seeing a giant call center dedicated to three groups who's sole job is to support the domain level technical needs of our posts overseas.

Week 5 of Training: COMSEC and Crypto

Great example of a crypto device that nobody uses anymore.

This week my quarter-of-the-class group was reunited with another quarter. So with twice the people we learned the magical arts of Communication Security (COMSEC) and Crypto(logy). The course is listed in the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) Catalog as:

"...a basic overview of Communications Security, proper handling, accounting and destruction of COMSEC material using the CARDS system. Emergency Destruction procedures, audits and the proper operation of various types of cryptographic equipment are also covered."

That pretty much sums up the class. It was relatively enjoyable, considering the material. Like all security related training, it was both vitally important and extremely dry. Apparently this job generally falls to the new hires at post, so we all have that to look forward to. On the plus side, we got to take a field trip... so I'll call it a win!

Colossus, used to break the Enigma.

PS: If you're ever in and around the Washington DC area and are interested in cryptology, you should check out the National Cryptological Museum!

Week 4 of Training: HF Radios!

Monday morning my classmates and I were happy to be back at FSI for week three of training. This week we tackled High Frequency (HF) Radios, yet another topic I knew nothing about before starting the class. I can now honestly say, radios are WAY cooler than I ever knew. Example: I never knew radios could use ionosphere propagation to broadcast past line of sight.

Our instructor was a huge amateur radio enthusiast and had many decades of work experience, so he was readily able to answer any and every question we had. The class covered everything from theory, to installation, operation and maintenance of HF radios. Although the class was definitely interesting, it was also one of those things you want to know how to use, but then hope to never need to use. In the current day and age, radios aren't really used for primary communication while at post (since we have the internet, satellites, and other direct lines), but can be invaluable for emergency situations. Especially in situations like Cario 2013, when the Egyptian government cut the phone and internet lines throughout the country.

Week 3 of Training: How to Commute!

Ostensibly the second week of training (for my quarter of the cohort) was about communication systems. It was taught by DTS-PO, and I'll let you read about what they do, if you so desire. The training was good, albeit a little lengthy for the amount of material being covered. We were learning about a system that none of the six of us have ever used, so it was definitely worth while, but...

For me, week two was a valuable lesson in how awful commuting can make my life. The traini
ng was not held at FSI, but rather at an offsite location even further from my house. Class started at 8, so I was fortunate enough to miss most of the morning traffic, leaving myself only an hour and a half drive. I was not so fortunate on the way home. My best day was just over two hours, and my worst was almost three and a half. Fortunately, the weather did me a favor and provided our THIRD snow day of the year on Monday. I'll be honest though, it was hard to feel too lucky on Wednesday when I was passing the 5 hour mark of 'commute time' for the day. <start rant> I was also a little bitter because they wouldn't give me mileage for the extra drive distance because it should be covered by the per diem that I don't get as a local hire! <end rant>

Week 2 of Training: Basic Telephones!

This week was our first week of 'actual training' at FSI. Since our group is so large, they split us into 2 groups, and then further split those groups into two groups for half the classes. My subgroup started training with Basic Telephones. The class started with learning to punch 24 gauge cross connects and finished with a practical exam to take the system from no-configuration to fully configured. 

Recycling our used wires!

I'll be honest... I knew next to nothing about phones going into this course... and it was a blast! I learned a ton. The instructor was informative and entertaining; the class was small, and the atmosphere was very relaxed. We finished all the material on Wednesday, so we spent Thursday doing a beefed up practical exam and took our written exam Friday morning. As expected, everyone passed. 

I hope my remaining 9 courses are as informative and fun as this one! Next week's class is offsite, which means a longer commute, but is another subject I know nothing about. I'm looking forward to it.

Distinguished Visitor

Former Secretary of State, General Colin Powell spoke at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) today. Listening to him speak candidly in a town hall setting was a fantastic experience. He is a quite entertaining person and is somewhat of a legend around the State Department for his time spent as Secretary. I'll be honest, my knowledge of the achievements of the our Secretaries of State is pretty minimal... but I did learn that one of his many successes was to 'bring the internet' to the State Department (so to speak). He pushed for the deployment of tens of thousands of internet-connected desktop computers to our embassies worldwide, often replacing Wang computers.

Anyway, he charmed the audience for around an hour with tails from his childhood, service years, time in office, and from his current charitable work, all told with a touch of humor. As soon as our orientation coordinators heard he was coming, they made absolutely sure to schedule him into our agenda. I'm glad they did! I just wish I'd been able to record it, to play back some of his best one-liners! Since I didn't, you'll have to live with one I found on the internet: "Bad news isn't wine, it doesn't improve with age."

Pack-out Pregame

Oh wait, that's a PACKERS Pregame...

You know, I've always been excited at the prospect of getting 'moved' by my work; more specifically I was excited to experience having someone else pack up and move all my junk. So when the time came, what did I do? I decided to pack up all my stuff before the official movers come on pack-out day. Sigh. As silly as that sounds, it makes way more sense for me to attempt to sell my house sooner, rather than later, and selling the house will be much easier if it isn't cluttered. If it sells quickly, I can pick up a short term apartment near the Foreign Service Institute and kiss commuting goodbye! Short term leases aren't cheap, but they're cheaper than a(t least my) mortgage.

Despite frequently being asked, I have no desire to attempt to rent my house out. Between vacant periods, manager fees, low rental rates and repairs... it just doesn't make short term financial sense. If I had any desire to move back to the DC-Baltimore corridor in the future, I might have considered going down that road. However, I hope to be done with this area for good, so it doesn't make sense to attempt to own a mediocre rental property... especially from a distance. That being said, maybe I'll be nostalgic for this place in the future, but for now, I can't wait to be done with it. Here's hoping that the real estate market throws me a bone!

The $12,000 Question

Do you live in this circle?

This is a well documented and heated debate, so I'll be brief, but I thought I should weigh in on the local hire per diem disparity. The GSA (General Services Association) outlines the requirements to receive per diem for temporary assignments (such as Foreign Service orientation and training). Those rules state that if you're traveling more than 50 miles, you will be paid per diem for the duration of the trip to cover meals, housing, and travel incidentals. The idea is, any shorter distance and you'll commute from home. This relates to people like me, as we are considered local to the Foreign Service Institute (actually, I believe the distance is measured from the Washington Monument), and therefore do not receive government provided housing and per diem during training. The rates, at time of writing, end up being about $12,000 over my estimated orientation and training period (give or take).

This system generally makes sense. I mean, my wife gets to keep her job (at least in the short term), my son doesn't need a new daycare provider, I get to see my friends and such (on weekends, since I'll have around 3 hours of commuting per day). However, with Foreign Service training, this system breaks down. Since I can't guarantee the speed at which my house will sell, I have to choose between selling early and then renting in Arlington on my own dime, or waiting until training is complete, and hoping the house sells quickly while I'm overseas. Of course this isn't that much different than out of area hires who presumably have to hurry up to sell their houses also. The big difference is, if I do sell my house, I also have to pack my own stuff, put it in storage, and then get it re-packed-out on pack-out day by the official people. Bummer. In the grand scheme of things it's not really a big deal. I'm probably just bitter to be facing a 90 minute each way commute... and having to pay for my own food! (Oh the injustice!) On the plus side, all that time on the trains and buses will give me lots of time to practice a foreign language, if only I knew which one to work on.

What's the take away? Apparently I should have moved last week! Oh, and even if it IS probably fair, nobody likes to miss out on the per diem gravy train! I guess this means no daily crab feast lunches for me.