Amazed at Amazon

Serving in FS can be rough and a lot of times, access isn’t easy. Many countries just don’t have stuff Americans want. And when you’re living out of your element, it’s nice to have access to your own brands, sizes, etc. And sometimes it’s just easier if it comes to you instead of you having to find it in a city you’ve barely explored.

I’m sure in smaller or more remote posts, there isn’t the plethora of stuff that I have available to me. I have it made here, and I know that. Still, though, it’s nice to be able to know that, if I really wanted something, I could get it, and get it in my size.

And really, I can. I am still subscribing to Netflix, even though the turnaround time is around a month. I can stream, too, but my internet is touch-and-go, plus the new releases aren’t available on steaming. (I’m still impatiently waiting for the latest season Mad Men to be available for streaming; it’s been out of DVD for a month now.)

I even have a Slingbox that allows me to watch American TV on my computer. Granted, I am again at the mercy of my internet connection, but it’s something that wasn’t available to FS members long ago.

It’s similar to PC, I think. For me, communication in PC wasn’t much different than it had been prior to serving. I could call my parents on Skype and email every day. That’s pretty much what I’d done from Detroit, so doing it from Morocco wasn’t anything odd, at least once I got past the time change.

Leading up to moving here, I did all my pre-packing of consumables that I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to find here. Honestly, I probably could have found a reasonable facsimile, but it was a good use of a new paycheck so I’m OK with that.

Right now, my grocery bill is hovering around $20 a week. It’s pretty much the only stuff I pay cash for in-country, since I’ve yet to take the metro or train anywhere.

Really, food and travel will be my bills here. I don’t have a personal cell phone, so I’ve even kissed Sprint goodbye.

It’s not likely that I’ll buy clothes here (I’m too tall), so other than the assorted knick-knacks I might eventually pick up, I really don’t think I’ll be throwing quai back into the Chinese economy, at least directly.

Instead, it looks like I’ll be stepping up the use of Amazon, which seems to be one of the few shippers I’ve seen that is willing to deliver to DPO addresses.

That’s the mailing system we have for overseas. It allows people to mail or ship to us to a local address. This is a big step up over PC, for sure. I mean, people on the receiving end won’t get any cool stamps, but the odds are good that they will get what I mail them.

Anyway, since I’ve been here I’ve realized I needed a few things and hadn’t been able to find them locally, although I know they’re here. For example, to use the pool at my hotel, I needed a swim cap. I know there has got to be a place that sells them, but I have absolutely no idea where that might be. Nor, honestly, do I have the wherewithal to mindlessly wander around the many markets, malls and shops until I happen onto one.

You know where has them, though? Amazon. A bunch of them. They have everything.

So far, I haven’t caved and paid the $80 or whatever it is for the free shipping, but most of my colleagues swear by it. I got an earful about how I should get the credit card, but I won’t be doing that. So far, and this dates back to when I moved here, I’ve spent enough to qualify for free shipping. (I'm not necessarily proud of that.)

It seems a good portion of FS folks swear by Amazon. It’s been fantastic to have access to it.

I splurged yesterday and bought myself a light therapy kit, which I’d seen in the Skymall magazine. I tried to buy it from Target, but they wouldn’t ship it to a DPO number. Well, bummer. (I was really irritated because I’d bought something else as an add-on from Target, too, and then they canceled the light, leaving me with an add-on I hadn’t really needed. More workout pants. Grr.)

But Amazon would ship it to me. Yes, it will take about a month or so (I’m still waiting on the swim cap order) but it’ll come right to me.

The cool thing, I’ve discovered, is that Amazon really does have everything. Including grits; I checked. Even though I placed the order yesterday for the light therapy kit, I’ve already made a list of stuff I could use in the next order.

Hopefully, my first order from here will be in soon. In addition to the swim cap, I have a small frying pan coming. Seriously, I could scramble two dozen eggs in the one that came with the apartment, only it’s not nonstick, so it’d be a holy mess.

And, in order to boost myself to the free shipping level, I added on a case of Junior Mints. How’s that for awesomeness?

At the office, I think we get package mail twice a week or so. It’s a lot like mail call at M*A*S*H, only we await our names at our computers.

The women who run the post office have a group email that says something like “Congratulations! You have a PACKAGE!” that they send just after 3 p.m., when our little mailroom opens.

So, on those afternoons, all of a sudden, you see people jump up and rush up the stairs to get their goodies.

It’s been fun to watch people claim all their Christmas stuff, especially those who are parents of small children.

I don’t really have all the timing down yet, but I am so ready to get that little email. I want my frying pan!

About those TPS reports …

Every new job is an adjustment. The job I’m in will be new every two years or so, so I need to get used this whole “deer in the headlights” look that I’m bound to have, like clockwork, as I try to get the feel for a new post.

Even though, bottom line, the job description is the same, the description as mentioned in the job add is so all-encompassing I don’t know that everybody does everything in a given two-year post.

A colleague of mine here, for example, just went to a three-day training seminar. It was for some software program I’ve never even heard of. Another college in the same position but a different office was messaging me the other day during some training that she had. Again, I’d never heard of the program. And I’m probably doing stuff neither of them has any clue about, but in two years, I might be in a position that requires the knowledge they are gaining now and they might have to learn about the stuff I’m doing.

My job right now is looking like it’s going to be very HR-heavy. That’s fine by me, and it seems fairly straightforward. One of the things I’m going to be doing a lot of – will be what we call “pushing through” annual reports each person has to do. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll call them ABCs.

Each person’s ABC is due in April and they’re dreaded about as much as taxes. There is a loophole to that in that if the person is new, they are due on the person’s anniversary. In my office, almost everyone is new.

For me, that’s fortunate, because a lot of people in my position have horrid springs, I’d guess, because they are frantically trying to help people push these things through. They’re something like 10-step processes that involve, at a minimum, three people – at least on paper.

The good news to quicken the pushing process is that you can gain “proxy” for someone to help push it, like if the person is out of the office but has already approved what’s to be reported.

It sounds simple, but it’s a PITA. I need to figure a way to help track where we are (I have about 50 people I’m helping) but the thing is, except for the very beginning and the very end, there are no incremental “due dates.” The whole ABC report is supposed to encompass a year and in theory you’re supposed to be working on it through that time period. In reality, it’s possible to do the actual computer part in a day.

This is assuming all the reporting part is done, and that part is not my job (at least for now.) Now, what I am trying to do is get people who supposed to have been doing this all year through in a day, using proxies for at least two people. The people need to get done because the stuff is either due, past due or coming due in a week or so.

This one person asked me to help, and gave me her proxy plus I had the proxies for the two others. So we’re on our way, right? Well. Not so much.

I’m still bad with names and I went to the proxy person’s queue where the report should have been. In it, there were two ABCs, one for J and one for A. J was a guy, and I knew him because we’d been putting out the same fire for a day. So, under the watch of the person, I “sent back” A’s report to the beginning because the first step had to be altered.

And then I realized the person standing in front of me wasn’t A. Holy crap. I’d sent the wrong person’s report back. Plus, we had no idea where K’s report was.

So upon realizing this little snafu, I immediately contacted A, the management person and the HR person, telling them what I had done, apologizing profusely and trying to figure out how to get A’s report back to the point where it had been.

And then it’s demonstrated that I work with the government.

I got an email from the HR person, who is new, who told me “never” to send the ABC thing back to step 1. She then attached the standard operating procedures of the ABC report.

Sigh. That wasn’t the problem. I KNOW what the procedure is. The whole point of what I was doing in the first place split from “standard” procedure, because procedure normally goes from 1 to 10 or however many steps there are in the darn ABC report.

I replied, saying I had done what I intended to do, but for the wrong person. Sending the thing back to No. 1 wasn’t the error. My bad was that I did it to the wrong report.

She then called me to tell me the same thing – don’t send back to Step 1. I’m like, look, I understand what you’re staying but that’s not the point. K *wanted* me to do this. It wasn’t that I did it, it’s that I did it to A instead!

And she went on and on about the SOP. It was totally the TPS reports from “Office Space.” I wanted to jab a letter opener through my ears.

Anyway, in the end, I think it sunk in to the HR person what had happened and she was able to find where A’s ABC report was and put it back.

We never found where K’s original one went. HR tried to blame that on me, but I never saw it, which was the problem in the first place. And apparently this had happened to another guy earlier in the week, too. He somehow got DC involved, but since we’re 13 hours ahead of DC time K couldn’t wait and we just re-created it from scratch. She had everything saved on a backup, so it was fairly easy even though I had to keep going in as one person, coming out and then going in as another.

This is what my life’s going to be like for the next two years. I’m not entirely sure whether that’s good or bad, but here’s what I do know: Payday is Thursday.

Call a Marine. No, really. That’s what you do.

For anyone who owns the “Drinks After Work,” you know this song. Well, if you have the deluxe edition, anyway. In keeping with the wrapped-around-the-flag image he’s cultivated so well, Toby Keith sings this cutesy song about how, if you’re in trouble, it’s handy to have a Marine nearby who can bail you out. In the lyric (and I think this was co-authored by Scotty Emerick, but it doesn’t say in the liner notes), they’re built to “improvise, adapt and overcome.”

I have Marines. Most posts do, although mine didn’t until they moved into a new building. I haven’t met them all yet, but I did figure out which one is from Florida.

They live in a compound at the office. From what I can tell, it’s one building and an outside area with a basketball hoop, although I’m not entirely sure. I knew they lived in the city, but I had no idea they were on the premises. From what I understand, they rotate out after a year.

On Friday, I went to my first Marine promotion. Normally these are big, impressive events, with everyone in the battalion (and I hope that’s the right term) in attendance. In this case, there aren't all that many, so some of the people from the office came and watched it. It’s a big deal to the person being promoted, and it really was a formal ceremony. Small and impressive as opposed to big and impressive. The head guy has everyone in line, and the “officer to be promoted!” stands in back. After the head guy informed us of the protocol and importance, he called up the corporal, who then stood at attention as the higher up read the declaration (I’m sure there’s a technical term) of his promotion to sergeant.

It didn’t take all that long, and after it’s over everyone in the room congratulated him. I hadn’t met him before, at least that I know of. They guard the doors, but sit behind this glass that has a horrible glare and I can’t tell who’s in there. Not that I have the names down or anything. I think I know two of the names. They have their individual pictures posted on the door to their main office and I tried to memorize that.

The names are going to kill me. I have about 120 people in my department and I’ve probably gotten down 10 percent of the names. I am just so bad with names. I have one of the sub-department’s bio sheets bookmarked and when someone comes by I try to match up the name and face. It doesn’t work all that often, and the photos don’t show size. One guy came in and said he was Eddy and I thought he was Ben. Ben is about six inches shorter, but they look similar in the photo.

There’s a lot of local staff, too, and man, it’s rough. I went with a group of three to do a daily paperwork exchange with S, Ben (a different Ben) and Ken. Then I switched and joined another group and promptly forgot all those names. I think the one woman went by initials. I’m really not good for more than two new names a day. I had already figured out S, so Ben and Ken were the new ones. And Jack is in the office supply room. Or maybe that was Jerry. Then there are three Cherrys. It’s very confusing.

On my errands with S, Ben and Ken, they were showing me how to do this hand-off. We went downstairs and through some kind of garage thing with two doors. I had no idea if I was supposed to shut the one door or not so I was kind of standing there and S couldn’t get out. I thought we were locked in, but she’d had that issue before and got it straight, so we made it out. (You manage to figure out quickly who runs the place, and S is one of those. Good person to know.)

Anyway, since that little errand is a daily thing, and I can see myself botching it, I asked if they ever did get stuck in that room. She said yes, it’s happened before. I asked what happened if you did get stuck in there and she said, “Oh, you call a Marine.”

I swear, I am halfway around the world from Nashville and my life is a country song.

See you later, America!

After a long travel day, I’ve reached my first post and am settling in.

My camera is in a shipment that’s coming later, so sorry no photos for now. But it’s really nice. Go with me on that.

It’s sort of weird that less than a week ago I was still in the US, doing all things normal. I left on Tuesday, and spent Monday doing a few catch up and check out things but mostly just tried to chill out.

I opted to go see “Catching Fire” at the Courthouse Theater and was appalled that the 1:45 p.m. showing was $10.25. That’s highway robbery, but I really enjoyed the books and wasn’t sure of my future movie options, so I bit the bullet.

Wow, movies have changed. This theater was AWESOME. It was one of the new pick-your-seat spots, and each chair was a comfy pleather recliner. The arm rest thingie also popped up to turn the chairs into little loveseats. I pretty much curled up into a ball to watch the movie.

I’d tried to go on Sunday, but it was sold out. Monday, however, was pretty sparse. I had an entire row to myself.

After that, I decided on Chick-Fil-A for my last meal in America for two years. I suppose some would find that kind of silly, but I really like Chick and plus, the peppermint shakes are back and I hadn’t had one yet.

My flights went just fine. I had some issues with my checked bag, which was overweight. That took awhile to settle, but once I got to Beijing it got complicated again. Eventually it got settled – I think there was some kind of error in DCA but whatever, it was fine.

I had another small issue in Beijing. I’m ticklish! I had to go back through security because once you clear customs you have to, and they did a pat down. I couldn’t stop laughing. It was a very un-diplomatic first impression, but I couldn’t help it.

My “sponsor” met me immediately and escorted my back to my apartment, which I was pretty happy to see. I arrived to the airport about at 9 p.m. and the apartment is about a 45-minute ride.

The place is nice but really not a whole lot like the website. I’m not sure which floor plan it is; I am on the very end of the building.

It's set up oddly, I think, but I have a fantastic view. However, much of the fantastic view is from the bathroom, which is glassed in. I can, and I'm not kidding, soak in the tub or sit on the toilet and see the city. Who needs reading material?  I can see this thing that was built for some sporting event – it’s a grandstand overlooking what used to be a pool; no clue what it’s used for now. There’s also the giant TV tower that’s in all the travel guides, the opera house, the museum and the river.

It's gorgeous but a little bizarre. I can see my office from the apartment, too. It's across the street from the Starbucks that looks like it's across my street. It’s maybe a five-minute walk.

The kitchen is a tiny closet and I can deal with that but there is no place to put your groceries. Not a single spot. Since I don't drink, I moved the wine service for six (which included a rack that used an entire pull-out drawer) and crammed it under the sink. That space is unusable for anything else because there are pipes and a fire extinguisher under there, but I worked around it to just store the stuff for two years. I got the coffee pot in there, too.

There are two doors because that's what fire regulations call for. Only my second door is about 10 feet away from the first, leading into the same hallway. If there's a fire in the hall, that 10 feet likely won't make a big difference. The second door, is, however, 10 feet closer to the emergency exit. I guess it has that going for me.

I am on the16th floor at the end of the building, which means I have the great view from all sides. I just looked and I can see a bunch of kids playing on the mini-golf course, which is really neat. There's construction out the view of another room.

My walk-in closet, which I've walked into multiple times so far thinking it was the second bathroom, looks nice but it's not too functional. There is a thing of drawers, but when you pull them out they're maybe 4-6 inches deep. The floor has a vacuum, stool, TWO ironing boards (one's new in wrapping - it'll be like that in two years, too), a laundry basket and some other stuff. Hence, no room for shoes.

I’ve problem-solved this by moving most of the stuff from the floor to the shower in the spare bathroom.

There are light switches everywhere. Each room has about three or more switches to various things. I was beat last night but spent time trying to turn out the lights before crashing. I am going to have to make labels. And once the lights were off, it didn't matter much -- since I have floor-to-ceiling windows with a city view, I had neon blue nightlights.

There is a TV in the living room and in each bedroom, so a total of four. However, there’s no consistent English channel that isn’t news. I can watch CNN or the BBC all day, but so far I haven’t seen anything that would be worth just leaving on for background noise.

I did try out my Slingbox this morning in an effort to watch FSU beat Duke. (Yes, morning. I’m 11 hours ahead of the east coast.) My internet is slow, so it was incredibly choppy and painful, but it was awesome to have some kind of access.

I don’t have a little hook on my front door, so I’ve had to hang the FSU flag that Dana gave me in the house. It’s sort of looped over a shelf. My Christmas stocking, which is also FSU, is sort of sitting on the next shelf down. My only other décor right now is a stuffed bald eagle that I got at the State store. I named him Indy.

There’s really no telling when my boat shipment will arrive, but I have a lot more decorative stuff in there. I brought a lot of my fridge magnets, but I had a sudden realization that in the new kitchen’s weirdness (which, BTW, includes having a washer and dryer in there) is that the fridge and freezer are the built-in kind that have faux wood doors that are not really wood (hence the “faux,” duh) but also not metal, either.

Thanks a lot

Happy leftover turkey weekend. The Noles beat the Gators and Alabama lost. We’re No. 1!

Yet another thing to be thankful for … Florida State is back. I have a little garden sign on my door (thanks, Dana!) to show my colors. I’ve gotten compliments on it.

The Gator game started a bit scary but thank God it leveled out and wasn’t much of a contest.

I will be out of the country for the ACC championship, but I’ve utilized my new paycheck and invested/splurged on a Slingbox. This is a device that hooks up to Daddy’s TV and allows me to watch what’s on their satellite.

So far I’ve only tested it in dry runs, because the events I’ve intended it for – FSU games – have been since broadcast on national TV, or at least TV that I get. That ends on Tuesday, so I am hoping this works.

All in all, I think my preparations are somewhat in control. I had a little bump with Sprint, when the in-person associate at the store gave me a “I don’t want to deal with you” vibe by flicking her fake eyelashes at me and telling me to call customer service, but once I did that the guy on the line was really nice and my phone will be canceled with no issues.

The next step is to park my number, so when I return I should be able to get the same number. That’s increasingly important only because I have been giving out my cell number with several of the new accounts I’ve been opening.

As I get ready to close down everything outstanding, I was taking down my phone numbers. I don’t keep that many numbers in my phone, and I got a new address book to safeguard them.

Transferring them, I was a little surprised that for the first eight entries, every area code was different. I guess I know a lot of random people.

Anyway, how was your Thanksgiving? I went with a friend to her aunt’s house and it was really nice. I figure it’s probably my last Thanksgiving in the US for quite a while, so I loaded up on turkey, ham and mashed potatoes, especially.

Although I intended to stay away from Black Friday, I did get drug along at 6 p.m. on Thursday to Best Buy. People, go home. It’s a holiday! There is still football to be had!

Tomorrow is my last day in country and I really hope to wake up and get the necessary stuff done early and then shift into cruise for the rest of the day. I’ve started packing, but at this point it’s just throwing stuff in a bag anyway, so it doesn’t matter much.

I did realize that I shipped my Skype headphones, which stinks. What’s worse is that I am not sure if I shipped them by air or boat, so it could be 3-4 months before I see them again. Don’t expect any phone calls from me.

If I can get done with my stuff early, though, I might wander into town and try to see “Catching Fire.” I aimed for it today after church but the 1:30 show was sold out and I didn’t want to hang around until 2:30.

Mostly, I’m just trying to stay low key. No outgoing drama for me, thank you.