bout de papier, Vol. 15, No. 4 (1998-1999) — Winter 1998/99 // Hiver 1998/99, pp. 36–37
Day One for me was August 30, 1993, and I joined the Department as a vision of sartorial safety; a bureaucratic fashion plate for the ’90s. My steel blue, round-around-the-middle Sears suit ensured I would blend into my surroundings, as if I were a part of the Treasury Board-approved vinyl furniture. My sister-in-law, alarmed by my panoply of solid-colour neckties, gave me a snazzy new tie with which to express my individuality in the only corporately-acceptable manner. 5 Besocked by Zellers and besotted with sentimental patriotism, I was ready for anything.
Eight of us started that day. We all arrived early and shuffled our feet for a while in the expansive marble foyer of the Lester B. Pearson Building. Right on time, we were greeted by the Assignment Officer: a svelte Calgarian with a broad smile and an understated prairie charm. She welcomed us, warned us about cafeteria coffee and explained in detail why we should give up hope of ever getting our own parking Caroline Haider spaces. The filling out of forms began at that moment, and continues to this day.
A good looking bunch, were my fellow first-dayers, with backgrounds in law or political science, journalism or even botany. In comparison, I am somewhat less endowed with what human resources enthusiasts like to call ’skills’ or ’ability’, but I still made it into the Foreign Service (owing to a clerical error and the fact that my Aunt Sophie used to make borscht for Barbara MacDougall).
Those who had previously worked on DFAIT contracts were much better prepared for the job. For example, they were aware that the statue in the foyer was not Howie Meeker as I had suggested, and they knew better than to expect solid information on anything further into the future than Thursday lunchtime. I had never set foot in the Pearson building before, and just tried not to look like a dazed trainee (I fooled nobody). One 1993 recruit told me all his first impressions of people were wrong.
C. NAID was the only person of his acquaintance that he felt was suitable for the job. He fits the service, he said, like a hand into a glove. Another new FS worried about how his friends would treat him, some having told him “you’re better than the Foreign Service.” I should add that these same friends used to call him “Slick Lizard,” and their mothers dress them funny.
As Day One wore on, we junior-most of flunkies pledged our loyalty, checked ourselves for security leaks, and had our Monday morning grimaces immortalized in our building pass photos. We attended sedulously a wrinkle-inducing series of welcomes and dress codes and dos and don’ts from various high muckety-mucks. I would describe most of these presentations as soporific if I had a thesaurus handy (and no desire to be promoted before the Mayan calendar ends in the year 2011).
Most humiliating of all the hoops through which brand spankin’ new ES bozos must leap on Day One is that ceremonial mortification known politely as The Rounds. Having no money for boot camp or hazing videos, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade has devised a uniquely effective manner by which to demonstrate to juniors the extent of their juniorness.
Picture this: you have a sheet of legal paper with eighteen acronyms corresponding to eighteen divisions of the Department. You spend division to division, tower to tower of the Pearson Building, collecting an egg-cupful of facts and wisdom, along with the initials of eighteen divisional secretaries. I recall thinking of how barbarian kings were paraded through the streets of Rome as a demonstration of Imperial authority. Okay, so we weren’t exactly bound up in chains and pelted with NAIDER’9A produce. But still, the horror, the horror…
Mercifully this intramural t scavenger hunt ended without fatalities, and our legal sheets were as packed with secretaries’ initials as our frontal lobes were with sage advice. Not many of the people we encountered on our rounds seemed to treat the exercise with greater than lunar gravity, except one individual we are sure had appeared in several of the Planet of the Apes movies. We did not receive a lurid briefing on seductive Soviet secret agents (which was a big disappointment, Cold War over or no); neither did we get a licence to kill or a three-colour CSIS decoder ring. We did, however, receive a $2 coupon for breakfast at the International House of Pancakes.
On the afternoon of Day One, each of us had an interview with our Assignment Officer. I recall having the queasy feeling I once associated with going to the Principal’s office. There was some solace in the fact that my Assignment Officer’s surname looked central European, so I thought I might break the ice with my grandparents-from-the-old-country gambit. Or maybe she would be so swept up in the enthusiasm generated by my Sears suit and sister-in-law necktie that she would offer me a posting in Paris and insist I be given a parking space. It didn’t, she didn’t, and I wasn’t.
What she did do, is come to the point: ’Tell me what sort of jobs might interest you.”
“Excuse me?”
“What are your interests?”
“Well, hockey mostly. Also Star Trek.” “No, what are your professional interests?” (pause)
“Should I have some of those?” “Couldn’t hurt.”
“Let me see. Well, I’d have to say foreign policy.”
“That’s a good start. Anything more specific?”
“I don’t know if I am really looking for a specific job. With my background, perhaps I would be best suited for something not quite so…specific.”
“You would like a vague job?” “Exactly!”
“Fortunately, we have plenty of those.” She opened a big, scary file folder, doubtless crammed with nebulous entry level positions, and hummed for a moment. “What do you think of Africa?”
’That’s the one with the zebras, isn’t it?” “Yes.”
“Well, as far as I’m concerned it’s… south of Europe.”
What was I supposed to say? My nearly limitless knowledge of African affairs consisted of three things:
i) ’Daktari’ is an African word; ii) Africa is hot; and iii) There are a lot of sand dunes in the top part.
On Day Two, I started work, vaguely, in the Africa bureau.
A few years later, I can see that Day One was a compressed version of Year One (or Year Five), because it contained all the main elements of life in the Lester B. Pearson Building: paperwork, meetings and ritual humiliation. Plus coffee. And an incomprehensible meeting with Personnel.
Mind you, I still don’t know what the secret handshake is.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 15, No. 4 (1998-1999) — Winter 1998/99 // Hiver 1998/99, pp. 36–37. Read the rest of this issue →
