reservations

I mentioned earlier that I had some serious reservations about joining the Foreign Service, time to elaborate. I honestly hadn't considered the job as a serious prospect until quite recently. I applied and did the tests for the most part to appease my dad. He works for the government and often reminds me of the many benefits of government service, namely a secure position, good pay cheque and stability...all a little mundane for my tastes. So we compromised, instead of general grad jobs with the public service commission that would suck my soul dry, I agreed to apply for the Foreign Service, which was at least in line with my degrees and interests, had a bit more sex appeal and most importantly was extremely competitive (meaning chances were I'd never have to worry about it).

As life would have it, this little plan backfired. It turns out that a job that has a good pay cheque, actually uses your knowledge and abilities, takes advantage of your interests, includes lots of travel and is n0minally cool is actually quite hard to come by. This clearly makes it very, very difficult to turn down.

Why would I want to turn it down you ask? Well there are an awful lot of reasons...I'm not sure how well most of them stand up but anyways. For starters, I'm actually quite happy. Despite being a drifter with no clear direction, I like my life. I moved somewhere because I thought it was pretty and romantic looking (it is!), I work in a job with cool people who make me laugh everyday and where I genuinely get to help people, but most of all I feel like I belong. I've moved a lot in the past few years, so this is important stuff to me.

Next reason is more ethically/ morally based. I've got a lot of issues with working quite literally for the man. I don't like that I will have to endorse and promote the government line to the exclusion of my own politics and values. My Masters specialisation was security intelligence and unlike a lot of my peers, the course showed me that there were a lot of problems with democracy and government infrastructure. Supporting something I'm not sure that I necessarily believe in is difficult...governments, even relatively benign ones like Canada's...are all a bit dirty, it's in their nature. I don't know if I want to be a cog in that machine.

Anyways, I'm sure there's more, but I'll save that for later :)

Oh and the secuity clearance continues...