Reply to Foreign Service Officers snooty?

Forum Index » Jobs and Careers

Reply to "Foreign Service Officers snooty?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have a neighbor who’s FS. She acts like nobody but her has any right to an opinion about international politics. I don’t even find her that well informed, pretty parochial actually. My guess is that the job isn’t actually that exciting under the surface. Hard to make a difference there,[b] so they console themselves by feeling worldly. [/b][/quote]

By definition, they ARE worldly. What a strange criticism.

[/quote]

Disagree. They work in foreign policy and live outside the US. But they do that in a bubble. I think it’s faux worldliness. As a taxpayer and American who lives overseas sometimes,  I think their lack of worldliness, lack of curiosity and their arrogance overseas to be disappointing and doing more harm than good. The Ugly American lives on. So disappointing. They’re also way too arrogant and focused on status to hear this critique. [/quote]

+1 I work for a USAID implementer in food security, and so I'm often spending months and sometimes a year setting up programs in some of the most difficult environments in the world. The FSOs live in a tiny bubble, rarely speak to locals who aren't employed by or through the Embassy, and are paranoid AF that everyone they meet is a spy, even fellow Americans. It seems like a lonely life, and not one that would actually make one worldly in the way that we use the word in English.

You take the fact that the multi-stage test and interview screens for a very specific personality type, and add the fact that they all go through the same training, and you get a pretty homogenous type of individual. Add the insularity of FSO life since 9/11 (Embassies moved to the outer regions of the capital cities, FSOs living in compounds even in countries where other internationals live in normal housing) and you have a recipe for weird snobbery. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics