Raise your hand if you've heard of Ouagadougou. Or Lome. I hadn't. All the others posts on Nina's 162nd training class bid list I'd heard of. Doesn't mean I wanted to go to very many of them, but I at least knew that they existed.
Let me back up. "Bid list": the list of open positions which Nina and the 97 other new recruits in her training class will be filling when they finish their training. The class gets the list, each trainee confers with his or her spouse/partner/family/guinea pig to rank each open position either High, Medium or Low priority, and then turns those rankings in to the Career Development Office, which ultimately makes the assignments (presumably taking the trainees' rankings into consideration). As I understand it, the CDO tries to match people up with their stated preferences in making the assignments, but at least theoretically would not hesitate to assign a trainee to a post with which their skills and time frame match up, even if the trainee has ranked that position as a low priority for him or her. This contradicts my previous understanding that it was quite rare for someone to get sent to a post s/he had ranked as a low priority. Anecdotally, however, we've still not met anyone from previous training classes who was sent to a post they'd ranked low.
So, what were some of those other posts, those places I'd actually heard of? The most relevant (that is, the ones we've ranked either high or medium) are: Astana, Asuncion, Belgrade, Geneva, Krakow, Kyiv, La Paz, Sofia, Vilnius, and Washington DC (for a one-year domestic post). Beyond these, there were more than a dozen posts in Mexico, two in Caracas, and two in Santo Domingo, to which it's at least conceivable that Nina might be sent, given her Spanish proficiency; this despite the fact that we've ranked them low. The rest of the posts were either in Africa or Asia, to which I can't imagine even the Federal Government would send us.
All that said, the list itself is not set in stone. Posts get added and subtracted--indeed, posts can be changed even after assignments have been made, and even, occasionally, after a good chunk of language training has been done. Thus, we still know relatively little at this point. The Kyiv post fits time-wise and, obviously, language-wise, but is not a position in Nina's particular job track. (Another side-bar tutorial--there are five career "tracks" in the Foreign Service: Political, Economic, Management, Consular, and Public Diplomacy. Nina's track is Public Diplomacy, the Kyiv position is Political.) The Vilnius post is a Public Diplomacy post, but requires functional Lithuanian--Nina obviously doesn't speak Lithuanian, though she could by the time the position starts, roughly a year from now...
And so on. You can see how many moving parts there are, and how rarely any one position will match up perfectly with any one candidate; the CDO describes the matching process as "chess in 3-D."
Not surprisingly, this business of bidding is what has been preoccupying us for the last 24 hours or so, since Nina brought the list home last night. It's a strange kind of obsession. On the one hand, it is undeniably a great spur to the imagination, and rather an electrifying new reality with which to grapple. On the other it's all perfectly bureaucratic, a nightmare of tedious scheming to get what you're after.
I don't know. That sounds too conclusory. I suppose that like any writer worth his laptop, I'm over-eager for a grand and punchy summing-up. The trick (if I've learned anything from J.D. Salinger) is to subdue the instinctive desire for impact, without defusing it. Needless to say, I'm working on that.
And how did this turn into a post about writing?
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