Via Burn Bag:
“I have spent most of my adult life avoiding the crazy, the incompetent and the stupid. But, once a year when I have the duty officer tour, they are funneled directly to me. I hate serving as duty officer.”
Via Foreign Service Problems: When you’re the duty officer and you get a call from an AmCit who is sure that the embassy has a helicopter and demands that you send said helicopter to pick them up from their hike because the AmCit is tired of hiking.
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The Duty Officer is in essence a consular affairs duty. Occasionally there will be non-consular (i.e., HR, medical, host government official) overnight issues that come through the DO, but the operations center and desk officers know how to reach the Embassy Management team in the event of something requiring non-consular affairs. So why should non-consular coned officers and other agency officers have to pull duty? It’s a modern technological world and the need for a duty officer is simply overstated. Frankly given the requirement that most agencies are required to subscribe to certain ICASS services, if we have to have DOs, why can’t other agencies charge for the time their officers put in doing CA work?
Hold on, checking with tech, two comments from @PeruDog and Sandra have been approved but not showing up.
ok. just a glitch, both are on display now.
Once a year? In small posts it is more like once a month.
For us in Jeddah it’s once every 3 months. It’s an onerous burden but somehow seems perfectly normal in the life of an FSO.