Pack Out Panic

This week was an interesting week. Not so much from an "interesting things happened" point of view, but more of a "well that was interesting." So, my experience with moving is pretty minimal. I moved approximately four times in my life. Home to college, college to an apartment, inter-apartment, and apartment to house. I never really had that much stuff until owning a house, and I've never been moved by professional movers. So having people come to my house and box up all my belongings about as fast as I could point them out was quite surreal.

Our packout was split into three days, due to some archaic contracting rules. The first day they packed and drove away our HHE (that is, our slow-boat-to-India items). The second day they packed and took our UAB (unaccompanied air baggage) as well as packing everything for storage, except the furniture. The third day they were supposed to take the packed goods to storage as well as packing and taking our furniture.

The panic in the title of this post came in two phases. The first phase was the insane amount of worry when we realized we didn't have all of our stuff sorted, not to mention separated, in preparation of the movers arriving. This was despite my spending much of the preceding weekend dedicated to preparing for them to arrive. You wouldn't think this would be a problem, but having never done a move like this where the default wasn't "everything comes," we were very worried that the packers would get confused and pack the wrong items, or we'd be constantly rushing around trying to point them to the correct items. However, we did a great job of last minute preparing, and the packers were very patient with us. 

The second phase of our panic came on Thursday, the third day of our packout, when I received a call informing me that the truck broke down and we'd have to reschedule. This posed a problem, since we'd been planning to spend the next week in a hotel in Arlington (close to FSI, so I could avoid the dreaded commute). Unfortunately, this meant Elizabeth would have to be at the house on the following Tuesday to supervise the final clearing out of our house. 

The sudden change of plans rippled down delaying the painting, photographing, and therefore the listing of our house for sale. Hopefully it will sell quickly and that won't matter, but I guess time will tell. It also meant I'd get the 'joy' of another three commutes between home and DC. C'est la Vie... we're almost out of here!

PS: We had 187 boxes of HHE, this is about 15% of them (pre boxing).

Blog Catch Up

I'm embarrassed to admit, despite my best intentions, that I've missed several minor milestones over the past few weeks. Rather backdate a ton of posts... I figured I'd just combine them all here. Enjoy!

May 12
We scheduled our pack-out and the "pre-packout evaluation."

May 13
We received our Diplomatic Passports (pictures of me sporting mine are forthcoming). This was also accompanied by a lot of groundless bragging to our friends (e.g. our son has two passports before he's two years old... that's 'two before two!').

May 23
After a brief delay, we handed our passports right back to get our Indian visas processed.

May 31
Pre-Packout Evaluation. This consisted of the assessor spending approximately 20 minutes walking around our (half-organized) house taking notes and asking us what percent of things in the room were going with us, and what percent were going to storage.

June 2
Our flights to India were reserved, paid for, and ticketed (in that order, none-the-less). This topic will have it's own post (eventually), since I want to detail the headaches we've had trying to get our two cats to post with us. However, long story short, we ended up having to pay the difference in airfare to fly through Frankfurt instead of Heathrow.

June 4
Our Visas are finished and awaiting pickup.

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!