Bidding

It's already time for us to bid on what our next assignment will be. Bidding is the process of expressing a preference for particular assignments out of the list of jobs where second-tour officers will be needed. The second tour, like the first, is a "directed assignment" - that is, the Powers That Be make the decisions, and while they like to take our input into account, in the end they put people wherever the job requires them to go. That said, most people end up getting one of the jobs they bid high. In choosing the bids, the most important consideration is timing; 15 of our 20 choices have to fit perfectly with my departure from Denmark, give me exactly enough time for all required language and functional training, and get me to the new post right when they'll need me. The other five can be off by a month or two. Timing was something we didn't have to worry about at all in A-100 when bidding for the first tour; it's kind of like going to a higher difficulty level on some fascinating puzzle. In keeping with that, there are also about three times more positions on the second-tour bid list than there were on the A-100 list.

And it is pretty fascinating. A lot of people seem to find bidding stressful and unpleasant. Personally, I find it fascinating and fun. I know wherever we end up will be a great experience, so I just find all the different possibilities to be very exciting and attractive. This would be a great job to do for two years! This one would involve a lot of travel to nearby posts in the region! This one is in such a fabulous location! This other location is totally different but also fabulous! I'd love to learn this language!

Of course I can't speak on mid-level bidding, which is the NEXT higher difficulty level, where you have to "lobby" for the various positions you want, use networking skills, and just hope that some post somewhere shows you love. But at least as an entry-level bidder, bidding is still fun. I do very much like potentials, possibilities, decisions that are not quite made yet. Right now there are about a hundred and fifty possible futures for me, each equally real. That's the approximate number of jobs on the list that would be possible for me in terms of timing. And that is really cool. When the picture crystallizes and exactly one of those futures becomes real, all the others will be lost, and with them, dozens of languages I might have learned, countries and cities I might have gotten to know, portfolios in which I might have become a (somewhat dilettantish) expert, people with whom I might have worked. Rather than feeling sorry for that loss, of course I will instead begin at just that time to get really excited about the one language in which I will get training (because it's required to demonstrate a foreign-language proficiency before the second tour is up, it's guaranteed that my next assignment will include language training), the one place where I will be working, the actual subjects I'll get to learn about and people I'll get to know. I love both types of anticipation.

And it helps that Bongsu and I are having no trouble at all in finding plenty of places on this list where we'd be thrilled to serve for two years. Even after the high-equity bidders (people whose first tours have been in difficult or dangerous places, and who get first choice off the bid list as a reward) have removed some of the cream of the crop, I expect we'll easily be able to choose a top 20 out of which even if we're assigned to one of the lower bids we'd still be very excited and happy about going there.