myretroperspective

For those who are unfamiliar with Flag Day I'm going to do a little background and then tell you about our experience. As the Foreign Service accepts new hires they make it very clear that you MUST have "worldwide availability."  So when you are invited to attend A-100 training, you have not yet been assigned a post.  The 3rd day of training the FSOs receive a bid-list with many posts all over the world, organized by city, language requirement, date when the job starts & a few other details.  You have 2 weeks to rank all of the jobs on the list as high, medium and low.  You are warned many times that the bid list is a living document and can change at any time.  They took a couple posts off and added a few on in between when we first got it and we we submitted our bid-list. You meet with a Career Development Officer (spouses are invited too!) to discuss your preferences and they represent you as their team of CDOs attempts to fill all of the jobs on the list...

More details to come... soon  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang

Many of you are aware that today is just ONE WEEK away from our flag day, and that next Friday, October 12th, we will find out where our first post will be! Honestly since we submitted our bid list last week I haven't been nervous about it.  I really relish the idea that our placement is out of our hands. I think we did an adequate job communicating who we are and any preferences that might come into play for us in particular.  At the end of the day, the "needs of the service" trump our personal preferences anyways so we can't put too much stock in those anyhow. I also surprisingly enjoy the bliss of not knowing where we're going.  It's exciting and there is anticipation of this new adventure.  The difficult aspects of leaving and moving (again) aren't reality yet.  Heck, I'm still dealing with the last transition of leaving Atlanta and moving to DC. Part of me doesn't want to engage with the next transition just quite yet. So I will savor this com...