It’s that time again when the Assignment Fairy determines our fate and we prepare to be flung to a far corner of the world in service of Queen and country.
Not for us the ritual of self-selection from the ‘situations vacant’ pages when it’s time for a new challenge. Oh no. The magic list arrives in the inbox at the appointed time and selections are made which you hope will at least influence in part where you might be sent by those in The Firm with the power to chose. No job interview, no application form, no competency based demonstration of suitability. No; a shortlist of between 1 and 9 and someone else gets to chose from that…. or not if one is particularly unlucky. Your lucky dip assignment may not feature on your wishlist at all. It might be somewhere sandy; it might be somewhere in the furthest corner of the UK. It might be Andover.
Our selection process is very simple indeed. Anything in the UK is immediately discounted. We can’t be Nomadic Brits – the perennial Ex-Pats we aspire to be – if we are living and working in Bristol. Then he draws up a shortlist based on the job, and I draw up a shortlist based on the place and a kind of pecking order is reached based on commonalties and strength of argument for the finial submission to the Assignment Fairy.
As my selection is governed entirely by my own ‘adventure points’ system along with research into where we can fly to from the nearest transport hub conducted entirely using Skyscanner, I quite often have to accede in this process. After all, there is a job to be done when we get there; and it’s not me that has to do it. For this reason, Brunei was discounted (dammit!), and Jordan was relegated to 8th choice.
I know I am immensely lucky that this is the process in our household. I have been at dinner parties where wives have said to me; ‘There’s a list?!’ when we have discussed in public our selection methods. Husbands glare at me in a manner which suggests they may just kill me for disclosing what they have kept secret. Future arguments of ‘I had no choice; the Queen is sending me there’ are forever null and void.
So anyway, the wishlist went forward to The Firm. Not a single UK job featured on it; but to be fair, 9 options were provided for the board to make their job a little easier and to increase our odds of staying away from Andover.
When the magic day came a little over 2 months ago now, we were disappointed to hear we hadn’t got our first choice (New York), but delighted to hear we hadn’t got the 9th (Afghanistan). By a stroke of luck, the lucky-dip selection was choice number two. The Assignment Fairy is sending us to Turkey!
Euro-Asian adventures will begin in February 2014.
Two Nomadic Brits 