The Foreign Service Journal, October 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2014 19 It’s All (Tech) Hands on Deck T here are sections of posts with an almost unlimited budget that request highly technical systems that neither they nor the people who work for them understand. If a system fails or malfunctions, they ask for more systems and more tech- nology. When something breaks, in an emergency they turn to the only technical persons at post. At many posts where there are no security engineers or technicians, the facilities managers and the locals can wind up working on some very sophisti- cated—and in some cases, dangerous— systems that no one has training on. Anonymous Facility Manager We Are Organized O MSs can organize the hell out of anything we want to. Llywelyn Graeme, Office Management Specialist We Don’t Make the Bureaucratic Rules T o my generalist colleagues: When you are an under secretary or ambassador and in a position to make change, just remember how much you hated the bureaucracy and how di cult it was to get things done within the State bureaucracy. Remember that the Washington-end requirements are often as big a headache for me as they are for you. Change them, and you’ll help us do our jobs better. Hunter Crowder, General Services Officer There Aren’t Enough of Us I ’ve only been working with the depart- ment for ve years now. However, in the last 10 years or so our programs have expanded rapidly. For example, the English Access Microscholarship came into being world- wide in 2004. is program has grown and grown, and to date it has provided after-school English classes to more than 100,000 students in over 80 countries. In addition, now we have more E-teacher courses, webinars, MOOCs (massive open online courses) and AmericanEng- lish.state.gov. I think the biggest issue for RELOs is still sta ng. ere are just not enough RELOs, FSNs working on English Lan- guage Programs, or Civil Service col- leagues in the Bureau of Cultural and Educational A airs to meet the huge, ever-growing demand for our programs. I think we currently have 29 or 30 RELOs for the entire world. RELOs in Africa cover 15 to 17 countries each. And with hiring freezes and attrition, we don’t have enough D.C.-based sta either. n Diane M. Millar, Regional English Language O cer Remember that the Washington- end requirements are often as big a headache for me as they are for you. — Hunter Crowder, GSO Specialist