The Foreign Service Journal, April 2005

for years on end. That’s certainly what I thought. Many of us also probably assume we are emotionally prepared to lose what we have. I wasn’t. Oddly, I think the loss would have been easi- er for me to accept if it had been caused by something like a war or natural disaster. That it was the result of something as trivial as bad routing and a broken cable somehow compounded it. From now on, I really will under- stand what the risk of losing my belongings means. I’ll probably still opt to take them with me overseas, but the things themselves are going to mean a lot less to me. ■ Thomas F. Daughton joined the Foreign Service in 1989. His assign- ments have included Kingston, Rabat, Washington, D.C., Thessaloniki (where he was deputy principal officer), and Libreville (where he was DCM from 2000 to 2003 and chargé d’affaires from 2001 to 2002). He is currently political counselor in Kuala Lumpur. A P R I L 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 17 F S K N O W - H O W The loss would have been easier for me to accept if it had been caused by something like a war or natural disaster, rather than bad routing and a broken cable.