The Foreign Service Journal, September 2003

near the bottom. On arrival at my first overseas post, I was dumb- founded to find how little office space and equipment we had to per- form our duties. There were a total of three direct-hire State Department IRM employees, and all three of us shared a single desk and a single unclassified (ALMA) workstation. One would think that Informa- tion Management personnel over- seas might actually get to use the unclassified Local Area Network once or twice a day. No such luck. Even if we had had another PC to connect to the LAN, there would have been nowhere to put it, since there was no room in our office for a second desk. Yet every other American working at post and 90 percent of the FSNs had their own offices and unclassified LAN PCs. So why is it that the IRM personnel assigned with the responsibility for maintaining and supporting these resources could not use them? Strange! I know of one post, and I am sure there are others, where a new mission office building is being constructed. I have seen the floor plans, which allocate two small offices for an IRM section with four Americans. In other words, there will be just two desks for four full-time, direct-hire American IRM personnel. By contrast, all the direct-hire FSOs will have individual offices. And many sections, such as political, consular and public affairs, have several extra offices for future personnel that have yet to be assigned to post. At that same post, all State Department direct-hire Americans, including IM personnel, were issued cell phones. But we did not receive the same cell-phone ser- vice: the Foreign Service officers and many of their spous- es got GSM cell phones, which have the widest reach internationally and are the standard in international cellu- lar communications, while specialists like myself received a local cell phone to go with the cheapest cell-phone plan that was available. In fact, the cell-phone service I used was so poor that I could not reliably make or receive calls. As a result, when it was my week to be “duty communica- tor” — on call in case an urgent telegram needs to be sent or received, another IMS responsibility — I had to stick around home every night and all weekend just in case the Marine guard needed to contact me. My request to the GSO for an upgraded cell phone was denied because my position, I was told, did not warrant this expense. In other words, our GSO was entitled to a dependable cell phone just in case he needed to respond to an emergency maintenance call to come unclog an officer’s bathroom toilet, but I could not get a cell-phone call from the Marine guard at Post One regarding a top-priority cable that required immediate attention! Clearly, the disparity between IM specialists and Foreign Service officers is not going away anytime soon. Any change to this corporate culture must start from the top, back in Washington. But IRM specialists can accel- erate the process by standing up and letting their voices be heard. No Recognition Without Representation The annual or semi-annual awards ceremonies at post can be morale-killers for IRM personnel, Americans and FSNs alike. While Foreign Service officers can reason- ably expect to at least be nominated for some awards dur- ing the course of their tour, IMS personnel should not expect to get anything. At first I thought this was because our supervisors were not nominating us. But that assump- tion was proven incorrect when I began managing IRM personnel and submitted four nominations for FSNs in our section. I was surprised that one of the nominations was turned down and two others had their cash award amounts reduced from $250 to $50. There was not enough money in the budget, I was told. I decided to withdraw the two nominations whose amounts had been reduced, and defer them until a more opportune time. On the day of the awards ceremony, nearly 70 percent of the GSO staff received awards. I believe I saw the entire FSN staff from the public affairs office come for- ward. With loud applause, numerous personnel from other sections paraded up to be recognized. Only one member of our staff, an FSN, received an award. Needless to say, I felt embarrassed for our entire IRM F O C U S 50 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 3 William Potter joined the Foreign Service in 1999 as an Information Management Specialist. He has served in Sofia, and is currently an IMS in Sao Paulo. On arrival at my first overseas post, I was dumbfounded to find how little office space and equipment we had to perform our duties.