Don't Cry for Me, Argentina (is my Next Post!)

Well... I won't say I had a pleasant evening. I must have eaten something that disagreed with me, and I spent all night paying for it. I was so ill that I couldn't walk more than a few feet without a break in the morning... HOWEVER, the one nice thing (?) about being sick in the middle of the night... is checking your work e-mail and seeing your next assignment!

Summer of 2016 will be busy: I'll be packing up, leaving Chennai, spending a summer in the US on home leave, and then settling in my second post, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Bidding wise, B.A. was in our top 10 (number 10, to be exact) and was a "high bid." We can't complain with that, especially considering the moderate hardship diffrential rating of Chennai, which directly effects bidding power.

Flag Day

Finally! They day we've all been waiting for has arrived. That's right, it's FLAG DAY! Today we received sweet, sweet resolution to the giant question looming over our head for the last week. Would we get our first choice post? What about our second...? Tenth!? Well, good news; I got my first choice! Chennai, India!!!

Being called relatively early in the ceremony was a mixed blessing, because it was difficult to maintain interest in all of my classmates posting assignments... when I really wanted to be running back to my family to exult in our upcoming move. That being said, I powered through and watched the rest of my classmates learn their fate. The majority I spoke with got their top choice, with a small handful getting their second or third (and one getting their fourth). I didn't memorize everyone's bid list, nor did I speak to everyone, but on a whole I'd say we did pretty well! The last bit of good news I received today is that my estimated departure date is June 26th, which our Career Development Officer (CDO) said was the earliest date for any post!

Time to furiously research my upcoming new home... in the mean time, enjoy these random pictures from the internet.

US Consulate Chennai.

Chennai Panorama.

Ranking Your Bid List

Given a list of 23 cities, how do you decide where to live for the next 2 years? This is obviously not a problem for most people, but it's on the mind of all the IMS hires in my orientation class. I can't speak for them, but I can certainly speak for me!

Our first draft bid list was straight from the gut. We literally just listed our top 10 and called it a day. After that, we used some of my wife's fancy decision analysis ninja skills to determine our priorities and reorder our list into our second draft. We further researched each of our top 10 choices at the Overseas Briefing Center (OBC) and finalized our rankings. Our final list has a couple 'strategic' rankings, but is mostly just an ordered list of places we would like to visit for an extended period.

When making our decision, we considered:
1) Housing distances from work and town.
2) Weather
3) Opportunities for regional travel and sightseeing
4) Post size
5) Differential Pay
6) Strategery.

Fortunately, our son is not in school, so we didn't have to factor in the local schools (yet). My wife and I are pretty tired of living in the suburbs and having to drive literally everywhere, so we're really hoping to spend some time living in a walking friendly area. Weather plays a part in that also, since it doesn't matter how close things are when it's negative 70 outside. As avid travelers, we fully expect to use our new locale as a starting point for quite a few trips (hey, that's what vacation time is for!).

Our only concession to strategic bidding was to group a bunch of the 'hot ticket' posts around the 7-10 spots. This forms a 'wall' of posts we're unlikely to get (since they'll probably top other people's lists), but makes it less likely we'd get pushed to even lower choices on our list. You know, we hope. Of course we might get any one of them, and that'd be fine too; I'm not totally opposed to a cushy first post.

There are three main pay modifiers for posts in the Foreign Service: Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA), Hardship Differential, and Danger Pay. Hardship Differential has double duty for our first post, according to my Career Development Officer (CDO). As extra incentive for more adventuresome first posts, she gives preference during the second post bidding, based on first post Differential. She called this equity (it's actually the sum of the Differential and Danger, but only one of the posts on our list has Danger). So whoever has the highest 'equity' from their first post, will get their first choice from the bid list for their second post. This will continue until everyone has a post. Although I do not want to pick my first post based on equity, it did give me some incentive to slightly lower my bid on the posts with zero Differential. Let's face it, who wants to get last pick next year?

Jeff, over at Ramble On, created a Google doc for our class to plug in our tentative bid lists to 'compare notes.' The trend data from that has been outstanding. At time of writing, 14 of us have plugged in our list, and only one of the posts is not in somebody's top 4 (and it's someone's 8th). Additionally, all but 4 of the posts are in somebody's bottom 4. That's some crazy diversity!

Orientation Dress Code

The official dress code for orientation is business formal (which translates to suits and ties for me). Although I have a couple of suits, to cover the occasional wedding, I'm not really in a position to comfortably wear one every day for three weeks. It's kind of an odd situation, since I know my actual position will rarely, if ever require me to wear a suit. In theory, I wouldn't mind picking up one or two to bridge the gap (I mean, it's not like they go bad very quickly), but it seems silly to do so before Flag Day. Who wants to be the guy that spends hundreds of dollars on suits, only to find out he's moving to Bangkok in a few months and can buy them for a tenth the price? I guess I better figure it out soon, February 10th is approaching fast.

This desire to temporarily put off purchases doesn't just apply to suits. It has become a recurring theme around our house. It's a weird feeling to know you're moving in the next few months, but not where. For example, every time I put on my jacket I notice the broken Velcro strap and think, "I should replace this....oh right... not yet." (enter superglue) This has happened with a handful of other things, such as dishes (perhaps spurred by my breaking yet-another-one), or my computer's keyboard which seems to be ending it's lifespan. It's surprisingly hard to ignore a lifetime of being told to proactively replace things (oh, consumerism). In the end, it's just a couple months of waiting and we can obviously make due with the purchasing freeze, but it comes up more often than I ever would have imagined.