Just attended the Australian foreign office's "Consular State of Play" briefing (which is their awesome way of calling the year-end report of all consular cases handled by Aussie foreign service posts around the world). There's a lot of sound advice to be had in the report for tourists of any country (get travel insurance! follow local laws!), as well as interesting data on the amount and kind of cases embassies and consulates have to face. For this briefing, they presented a couple of case studies from Thailand to serve as cautionary tales for the travelling instagrammin' throngs (I repeat: GET TRAVEL INSURANCE. FOLLOW LOCAL LAWS). All of this info later led me to stumble upon a recent online article describing some of the "many bizarre, and often serious requests our (Australian) consular officials contend with (in Thailand) every day."
Go on then.
Not bad. And that's just from one country. Oi, didn't the British foreign office also keep a list of this sort of thing? Yes, they did! I wonder if the Aussies also have a global greatest hits compilation? Yes they do!
For anyone who might think to complain about the length of our passport application form (one page, back-to-back), I'd just like to refer you to a recent snarky musing of a popular American football columnist
Meanwhile, our judiciary already appears to have gotten a step on the Americans in the bureaucracy reduction game
I mean, if nothing else, "Juan dela Cruz -- Decongestion Officer" will look awesome on a calling card.
(UPDATE! -- Just a few days after I make the above post, there are late-breaking reports that our very own Department is winning the war on tape . . . with an exhibit booth!)
(A winning exhibit booth! That placed third...runner-up!)
(Once again...we owe you, Captain DFA. We owe you.)
It's been a pretty bad stretch of press for our counterparts at the British passport and airport offices. First, they faced a backlog of applications so ginormous there were high profile Parliamentary charges, apologies and investigations.
The initial findings
This was followed by a series of stories of people who mistakenly grabbed and used someone else's passport, and went on to be totally not chill about it
The internet reacted with its usual objectivity
So what do you do when you're faced with such bad publicity? You go on strike of course!
Which went over well
To this point, I had some empathy for the passport and airport workers -- heaven knows it can be a hard and thankless job. However, recent incidents left me more conflicted...on a very personal level
Good thing I didn't include the LLDD-baby's "Ma. Leia Organa" second name in her British birth certificate
I needed to consult "certain" foreign office colleagues on such a landmark issue. The consensus: as much as we would like to support the rebellion and its travel plans, as civil servants we are duty bound to follow the express provisions of the passport law, i.e., "in case of a discrepancy between the applicant's name in the birth certificate and in any other private documents, the former shall prevail over the latter..."
...BUT without prejudice to waving a hand and stating under oath: 'You do not need to see my identification' ".
Crunch time. The Olympics are just a few days away, and everyone is stressing. Athletes are nervous over their training, tourists are anxious about bookings, embassies are occupied with visiting delegations - even I'm having sleepless nights over what to do with the LLDD-Hyphen-L and LLDD-baby during the games.
"anak, wala talagang ma-score na tickets si daddy"
The one who's under the most strain, of course, is London. To bring you up to speed on what's going on, here's a quick special Olympic edition of "Travel Advisory":
I heard the non-stop rain turned Hyde Park into a mud pit, forcing the cancellation of several Olympic run-up concerts including...oh...oh God, no...NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
Puts the whole "CICC has a leak" hysteria into perspective, doesn't it?
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(UPDATE! By the time you read this, you would have heard of the Korean football flag flap. The funny thing is, just a week earlier, organizers had expressed confidence nothing of the sort would happen during the games. The whole thing is a cautionary tale for all FSOs and protocol officers out there, and "Borat" should forever haunt them in their sleep. High five!)
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Still, I have faith London will pull through and stage a great games. Why? Because I had the privilege of joining Team Philippines' Olympic Village Welcome Ceremony -- the delegation's first and defining impression of London organizers -- and it was one of the sharpest, happiest, trippiest things I have ever seen up close. By the time it was over I was skipping along and bursting into uncontrollable fits of laughter. Like all Olympians should.
Because if performance art and "Don't Stop Me Now" don't work, what hope is there for humanity?
In an obvious wala 'yan sa lolo ko smackdown to this blog's "Consular Query of the Day" feature, the UK foreign office just rolled out the latest in its "ludicrous inquiries/bizarre demands" series. Among their greatest hits:
A man asked a consulate in Greece for information on how to go about putting a chicken coop in his garden
A national pleaded for assistance translating "I love you" into Hungarian
Complaints were filed over the quality of plastic surgery, and a jam that would not set.
A man called to say he was stranded at the airport by his dominatrix.
A request was made to get someone to throw a coin into the Trevi fountain for them, because they forgot while they were on holiday, and they want their marriage to succeed.
Well played dear sirs, well played. But I've said it before and I'll say it again -- that's the difference between other foreign services and ours: we WOULD have helped out a guy who lost his false teeth.
By roads and backways a lover's chance down a wind Cut open murmurs and sounds be calm hands on skin Carry further oh...entangled strands all sing Saving some time to slip away we could dance oh.. Shouldn't be asking wild and scheming Could be my election day
Sorry, but after pulling 40 straight hours of poll-duty on just 40 minutes of sleep, I'm as coherent as Arcadia (nee Duran Duran) right now. So let's kick things off with a special Election Day-related "Travel Advisory" for some perspective instead. As before, guess the country from where the following headlines originated:
Here in London, the Embassy's overseas absentee voting went smoothly, if exhaustingly. Regulations required us to complete vote-counting at our stations uninterrupted from start to finish, i.e., there would be no going home, no night's sleep, and no - ahem - bathing. At the end of everything, I felt a newly-affirmed respect and admiration for our public school teachers who used to do counting the old-school way: writing and computing everything by hand, tara by painstaking tara.
(don't worry, I didn't know what a tara was either before OAV; now, not only do I know what it is, I know to yell "Kahon!" after every fifth one).
Put simply, we here did our counting in the relative comfort of the Embassy, yet were still totally spent and drained at the end of it all. I can only imagine what the teachers felt and went through -- working with fewer facilities, subjected to heat and the elements, pressured by the media and the public and, more recently, subjected to bitching on the internet.
To those teachers who were able to do their jobs despite all that I say, Bravo! Ignore the whiners, naysayers and know-it-alls on Facebook. As my mom (a teacher herself) used to say "Those who can, do; those who can't, forward messages and make lame status updates."
(Mom is surprisingly hip with the social-networking)
Special shout-out also to everyone back home who helped pull off the automated elections. Again, y'all found a way to work while others just looked for ways to complain. When I was back home a couple of months ago for a legal training course, for instance, we had one speaker who - instead of just providing recent developments in law like he was supposed to - took the opportunity to smugly subject the captive audience to a four-hour self-promotional rant against the new process. His jowls were shaking as he literally shrieked "FAAAIL!!!!" and "WE'RE DOOOOOOMED!" over and over again.
Where you at now, Fail Boy? Actually, I don't know and don't really care, so long as you're nowhere near any of the OAV people around the world or teachers back home getting their much-deserved sleep, FTW!!
(yes, I had to ask Mom what FTW means; she's surprisingly hip with the gaming chatrooms)
4 May, 5.00 p.m (all times London) - A few days before the elections, Embassy and Filcom personnel take their oaths as poll officers. For photo-op purposes, the oathtaking was re-staged a couple of times, and it was a testament to everyone that they gamely went through each re-shoot without any difficul....
....OH MY GOD! THAT'S THE LLDD-HYPHEN-L'S MUSIC!!!
8 May, 10.00 a.m. - Everyone goes through their last "echo training", which is basically just me repeating what I learned in Madrid, but "echo training" sounds more bad-ass. Needless to state, I overuse my "What makes a ballot spoiled? Upbringing" joke, but what the heck, my audience was as captive as Fail Boy's.
10 May, 11.50 a.m. - Even though I knew it would be cutting it close to the deadline, I chose to be one of the last to cast their ballots. The fact I knew in advance there would be camera crews to capture the polls closing had nothing to do with my decision, nothing at all.
10 May, 6.00 p.m. - Hours after the polls close, no vote has actually been counted yet as we still have to sort out and validate the thousands of ballots. I already look like I've aged 10 years (damn you embassy photographer and your high-def SLR!)....
....while the LLDD-Hyphen-L still looks fresh as a daisy as she rocks a "100% Pinay" T-shirt. She said it should more accurately read 75%...but who's counting! (Get it? Who's counting? Elections? Counters? It's gonna be a long night)
10 to 11 May, 7.00 p.m. to 4.00 a.m. - As vote-counting proper begins, the reality sets in that we can't physically go through more than 50 ballots every two hours. This means - with 500 ballots per precinct - everyone is looking at at least 20 straight hours of work. Fortunately, people would every so often pass around refreshments to perk things up. Everyone's favorite (above) was some cannoli bought from a nearby Italian dessert place; the least favorite (below) was some coffee I personally made timpla that looked, smelled and tasted like something that rhymes with "rap".
11 May, 5.00 a.m. - Breaking dawn is when the LLDD-Hyphen-L's precinct (upper window) and mine (lower) finish half of their ballot-counting. It's also the chick-flick the LLDD-Hyphen-L will drag me to as payment for making her work without sleep.
11 May, 4.00 p.m. - Precincts headed by more senior Embassy officials approach the finish of their counting. I will say, having FSOs lead the counting makes perfect sense because, by their own admission, they are totally O.C.! I guarantee the truth and accuracy of their figures - not just out of a sense of responsibility, not just because it is the right and moral thing to do - but because it will freakin bug them in their sleep if any tara is out of place!
11 May, 6.30 p.m. - Finally, the last ballot is counted. Hugs and high-fives all around! We can all go hom....oh, wait. Everything still needs to be tallied, verified, initialled, signed, thumbmarked, sealed and documented. Since there are dozens of document pages and hundreds of candidates, wrapping up actually takes another four hours to complete. Good thing those with O.C. live for tallying, verifying, initialling, signing, thumbmarking, sealing and documenting things over and over! Good times!
12 May, 12.00 a.m. - OK, now we head home? Nope, not just yet. Everything still has to be reviewed and approved by the board of canvassers. The mood here is sort of a cross between expectant fathers at a hospital waiting room and contestants facing the American Idol panel of judges.
The canvassers' bad ass-looking version of Simon Cowell on the right, for instance, called my handwriting "pitchy".
12 May, 2.00 a.m. - The LLDD-Hyphen-L and I finally go home, and sleep the sleep of the (feeling) righteous. Everyone in the Embassy has a good feeling of accomplishment and, again, deepened respect for all those who did the same thing under more difficult circumstances back home. Still, as one of my bosses said, "I want a PCOS machine for Christmas!" Later in the day, I get to read some of my batchmates' posts about their OAV experiences at big Embassies ("canvassing time! electronic transmission! woohoo!") and small ("grabe ang hirap namin dito para magbilang ng 12 votes =)".
I would have flamed those batchmates, but was too sleepy. I just let Arcadia play us out.
Pull my shirt off and pray, i'm saving myself to suffer the heatwave Pull my shirt off and pray, we're coming up on re-election day
(that...that actually made some sense. I must really need more sleep)
To wit, that bloody tube strike was a bloody inconvenience to every bloody one of us. On my part, I left work late hoping most of the chaos and congestion had eased, but no such luck as full bus after bus after bus after bus passed by without bothering to stop. When one did stop, it was immediately swarmed by people, with the bus driver frantically yelling "those who got on through the rear door, get off the bus, NOW! I WILL NOT MOVE!!!" Not that I was one of those who tried to sneak onto the back of the bus, but the driver scared me so much I decided to take cover in the nearby movie theatre and watch "Night at the Museum" 'til it all blew over.
(10 bloody pounds to see Ben Stiller, by the way)
When I finally left the theatre, it was close to 11pm, dark outside, and the buses. . .were still full and still not stopping. But, hey, at least it started raining! I only lucked out and caught a ride thirty minutes later and arrived home close to midnight. Hai ya.
But that's just my personal experience. Let's hear what some locals think:
So, um, yeah.
But strike's now over. Both sides have been heard, operations have normalized, and all's well that ends well.
I do nothing if not exaggerate on this blog my importance to the foreign service. I predicted three weeks ago, for instance, that there'd be hell to pay the moment I went off to PDOS. In reality, my office functioned normally, officers and staff covered for me effortlessly, and Pardek's reaction upon discovering I was away at PDOS was a resounding "meh".
Good Lord. How'd I get from beach getaways to gruesome tragedies? What's happening to me?!)
Day Three
And sheee wiiiiiilllllll beeeeeee lovvvvved.......and sheeeee wiiiiiiiilllllllll be lo-huh-huh-ovvved
(I'll explain this some other time)
Day Four
Philippine Culture and Values. The speaker emphasized how kind, affectionate and compassionate Filipinos really are, and cited a study showing Pinoys – by a wide margin - say “I Love You” more than anyone in ASEAN (you can almost hear the LLDDL shouting, dapat lang, 'no!)
Day Five
Simulation Exercise, and last day of PDOS. We were given a very limited budget to work with, but still managed to put together some very nice touches, like: 1) the string quartet above (alright, alright, there were five of them, were from the Air Force, and used a Casio keyboard, but they did a killer cover of the Pinoy Big Brother theme song)... ...2) an open bar with FSO bartenders (the 2008 Welch's sparkling grape juice at the bottom left was a prized bottle from my private cellar)... ...and 3) this guy.
I played the pretend host country's foreign minister, and The Evaluators loved my toast remarks. “A toast tour-de-force”, raved Protocol. “One of the best remarks of the simulation season”, gushed the Institution. “I almost peed in my pants”, wept the guy playing the pretend media.If only I actually wrote the remarks myself.
Finally, the simulation closes, and PDOS comes to an end. Because of our bad experiences at graduation ceremonies held by the Institution, my FSO batchmates and I tense up when the names are read, assume we won't graduate,and reflexively plot our revenge. Turns out, we all passed, were awarded certificates of completion, and given the go-ahead to make ourselves available for posting.
