Two Years in India, Week 7: A Wild IPO Appears

"You use SHOW HIM AROUND. It's SUPER EFFECTIVE!"

Now that I have the super-nerd title out of the way... As the title implies, the new IPO arrived this week. I'm not here to talk about my coworkers, so I'll pretty much refrain, but I will say, it looks like we'll have a good two years together. I've been told by some of the 'old hats' that approximately 1 in 10 posts I go to will have some sort of personnel friction. In a 20 year career, I'm looking at 7-10 posts... so here's hoping I never have any problems! 

The new IPO spent most of the week taking care of paperwork and spinning up on what's going on around the post. He has some great ideas for things to work on while we're here, so we should stay busy. Not to brag... but I'm totally going to. He'd mentioned that he was a little nervous working with a first tour person, but when he got here he was relieved to find I had everything under control. He said he was impressed with how well I was doing so soon after starting (end bragging).

Other than that, the week was pretty standard. I got to spend another night at the airport (hooray!) and I'm now officially sponsoring the last arrival for the summer season. It'll be an interesting learning experience, since they've already started asking me questions that my extensive seven weeks of time here haven't taught me! Fortunately, there are plenty of people I can ask. 

The week ended with one of the three mandatory holidays in India. Friday was Independence Day. We were warned (a little) by the RSO and (a lot) by our all-arounder to avoid crowded places, since they can be targeted for terrorist attacks during the holiday. We decided to heed their warning (nothing happened) and hung out around the house. We spent the afternoon at one of our friends houses that has a nice yard for the kids to parallel play (at least my son just rode someone's balance bike around and otherwise ignored the other kids). I also caught up on sleep from my overnight pouch run.

Seven weeks, or 7% down... 93 more to go. We didn't take advantage of this three day weekend, due to my late night working this week, but we're currently trying to figure out what we're doing for our next couple long weeks. We're hoping to make an overnight trip somewhere (or somewheres). 

One last thing, our new (permanent) driver, Subramani, started this week. He's been good, but my son keeps calling our car "Sundar's car" after our last driver. Also, every time we go downstairs he says we're going to see Sundar... He really liked Sundar, too bad we couldn't (and didn't try to) steal him from my sponsor! Fortunately, he seems to be warming up to our new driver also.

Taking Care of Business (and Working Overtime)

It's always interesting to learn differences between being a Foreign Service Generalist and a Specialist. This week I learned that Generalists are only eligible for paid overtime (or comp time) until they get tenured. Specialists, on the other hand, maintain their eligibility throughout their career. The lack of volunteers to escort diplomatic pouches at the airport with me suddenly makes way more sense. I wouldn't want to do it either, if it was unpaid!

I should specify, I end up working extra most days, but it's generally 10 or 15 minutes here or there. I'm not staring at the clock for the moment I can bolt... but for things like this week's pouch run (5 hours in the middle of the night) or the poor folks who are assigned to be Duty Officer on a three day weekend and spend all Saturday at work... without credit or overtime. Bummer!

First Game Night

Well, you know what they say. You can take the gamer out of the city, but you can't take the ci... wait that makes no sense. On the plus side though, we held our first game night in India! With the limited game options (until my HHE arrives), I kept it small, but we had a good time. We played Love Letter and Hanabi, which aren't technically board games, but who's counting? Shortly after arriving, I posted on the consulate's social page advertising my love of board games and I have fortunately received a lot of inquiries and interest from people. I'm hoping this means we can establish some sort of regular game night. It may sound odd, but this is one of the biggest things I miss from living in the US. It makes sense though, Game Night was one of my two regularly scheduled social events (the other being Nerdy TV Night, a name that became grossly misleading in recent years as we ran out of nerdy shows we wanted to watch). 

Note: This is not how you play either of these games...

Two Years in India, Week 6: Acting IPO

I sipped from the cup of IPO power this week, and it will be hard to let go. Actually, it was pretty much the same as every other week. I continued doing the day-to-day things that justify my presence in country, but as a bonus this week I got to go to the section heads meeting. (Note to self: when representing your section at a section head meeting, prepare something to say about your section.) Anyway, I spent the rest of week six cleaning up our space in preparation of the actual IPO's start date on Monday.

Fun fact: I've now shredded/disintegrated around 100 kgs of unneeded documents from the '80s, '90s and today (read: 2000s)!

Fun fact 2: I found a bunch of gas masks circa 1985... they're expired, so we have to destroy them (in case someone tried to use them in a real emergency and they didn't work... leading to government liability). Anyway, the fun fact is that oxygen cans from 1985 smell awful.

Useless Air Baggage (UAB)

Well, there's good news and bad news. The good news is two full weeks after it arrived in India (five weeks total), our Unaccompanied Air Baggage (UAB) cleared customs and was delivered this week! The bad news is that we did a terrible job choosing what pack in it. In our defense, our pack-out was backwards. Rather than packing our UAB on the first day and our House Hold Effects (HHE) on the second day... we had to guess what would fit in our UAB because our HHE was packed and taken away first. This brings us to:

Mistake #1: Not using our full allowance.

• We were allotted 600 lbs of UAB. We used <250 lbs. Mainly because we're terrible at estimating weights and were terrified of being overweight.

Of course we also did what (we've heard) is common for first tour officers and that is:

Mistake #2: Terrible pre-packing planning.

• Call us cocky, call us naive, but in our minds we saw this as any other overseas expedition we've taken. More specifically, we didn't think we'd need anything outside of what was in our suitcases. We were even less concerned because we knew we'd have the "welcome kit" at post, which has all the necessities, right? And... they do sell stuff in India.

Mistake #3: The welcome kit is awesome, but it doesn't have everything.

I guess you live and you learn. We've started a spreadsheet of things to make sure we pack in our UAB for our next move. It's a long ways off, but this way we don't have to try to remember in two years what we miss now. What's on the list, you ask? Well, it's still in progress, but here's a teaser.

• Choice kitchen supplies (I miss you, fancy cookware)
• Extra toiletries (for those that you care about the brand - or softness, in the case of toiletpaper)
• TOYS (HOW DID WE NOT PACK TOYS IN OUR UAB?)
• (More) Cat food and litter
• (More) Diapers and wipes
• Pillows, sheets, and blankets (Sorry welcome kit, but we don't want 1ft thick pillows)
• Board games (you know, if you're into that)

What did we actually pack? 

• The 'rest' of my clothes
• Cat litter (but not enough to hold us over until our HHE arrives)
• Diapers (see above)
• A stroller (I guess this qualifies as a toy, since my son never sits in it, just pushes it)
• Extra shoes (...)
• The cover for the bread knife and one chopstick (kitchen items somehow left behind by the HHE packer)
• Toilet Paper (small victory)
• Aerosol Sunblock and Bug Spray (Deemed too dangerous to ship via boat, go figure)
• Candy
   

I will give a quick shout out to my social sponsor... we arrived at our house on our first night to two big boxes of loaner toys. That was pretty much the best thing that could happen, because without those I'm pretty sure my son (or wife) would have gone insane by now. (And something to note if you do become a sponsor, since every parent we talked to here would have LOVED if their sponsors had done the same!)