Sticking Around

So, over the last few weeks, Steve's been hearing rumors of a passport taskforce at State Department. You might be asking What's a Passport Taskforce? and What's Steve got to do with that? Well, the answer is simple. Congress decided that effective January 20-something of 2007, ALL US citizens needed a passport in order to get back into the US, even if they were just hopping across to Tijuana for a donkey show and coming back that night. Unfortunately, Congress didn't think to give State Dept more money to hire people to process all of these passports, nor did anybody in Congress (or maybe even at State) think about how big a percentage of the 300+ US citizens didn't have a passport and might want one (Those donkey shows are tight, or so I, uhh, hear!)
So, in January and February, as Americans started hearing from their friends that they needed a passport to travel ("What?! You mean they ain't gonna accept my driver's license no more? Damn Government. I'm gonna go join me one of them militias; this way, if they track me down, at least I'll be more heavily armed!"), they started submitting applications. Can you imagine what happens to a system that's used to processing 20,000 applications when it gets flooded with 20,000,000? The wait time rocketed up past the "normal" 6 weeks to something approximating 2 years... State, however, had a solution. They decided to recruit State's highly trained and overworked Foreign Service Officers, especially the ones in training in DC, and pay them overtime to come in and either adjudicate passports or answer phones from Americans who want to know where their passport is in the process.
Unfortunately, they didn't get enough volunteers. Something about important missions abroad and being understaffed and overworked in the embassies or something. I'm not really sure. So, State decided to pull from those people who were most available - the Junior Officers who were already in DC, in training, getting ready to go to Post. While these JO's aren't the only ones being picked (not by a long shot), they are the group that most affects Steve. So, after hearing rumors of people getting told (as little as a week before they're supposed to head out to Post) that they have been assigned to the "Taskforce" and, instead of Iceland, would be going to New Orleans or Portsmouth, Steve decided to find out for himself.
On that fateful day when he spoke to his Career Development Officer about the Taskforce, he was told, "We're going through the list of everybody who's at FSI (The Foreign Service Institute, where diplomats are trained) and selecting those who have some time and we can assign to the taskforce. Post is being told to 'Suck it up' and will just have to deal with being shortstaffed."
So, now at the top of the list (owing to his curiosity), Steve has been assigned to the Passport Taskforce from August until Mid-October. The plus side is that this gives us time to get Katie "in the system," and get her medical clearance so we can travel together. The other plus side is that we'll be staying right here in DC.
Ya'll come visit now, ya hear? You don't need a passport to get here, just to Bahrain!