Thinking ahead

Yesterday Shawn’s bid list came out. For those of you unfamiliar with the Foreign Service, this is the list of open jobs that he can bid on (request) for our next tour. Sounds great, right? Well, let me just explain the process to you and you can make up your own mind.

Working for the government somehow involves a lot of rules and regulations. Crazy, I know. When the bid list was initially posted, there were approximately 400 jobs on it. Shawn is required to work in a consular position for his next tour in order to qualify for tenure, so that brought the list down to about 320. Still not too bad. However, the next two considerations – language required and timing – brought the list down to a whopping total of 24.

Okay, so there are still some good options on the list; it’s just full of places that we never really thought about going. Some of these jobs will probably fall off the list after the first group of officers bid (people who are in more “difficult” posts than Kyiv will bid first). Another unanticipated issue is that several of the jobs are on islands, which for the most part means quarantines for pets. So we have a lot of thinking to do about that.

The bottom line is that Shawn is required to bid on 20 posts, so we already have it narrowed down to what is going to be on that list. Now it’s just a matter of research and deciding what order to place them in. The next few weeks are going to be busy ones.