I’ve spoken a lot about the glamorous side of the Foreign Service here on The Hegemonist.
It’s not all glamour.
There are three kinds of trash in the State Department. There’s the trash you can just throw away, there’s the classified information that has to be shred immediately, and then there’s the stuff that is sensitive but unclassified or has personal identifiable information, that doesn’t need to be shred immediately but can’t just be thrown away. If you don’t pay attention, this third category can stack up. It will stack until you get to a day when things are a little slow, and you just can’t put it off any more. A day like today.
The embassy has a large, industrial disintegrator in a controlled access area that can shred large amounts of paper at a time (unlike the little office shredders we all have that take 1-2 sheets at a time). Because of where it is, only an American with a security clearance can go, so I couldn’t assign it to someone on my staff. There was only one man who could take out this trash–me.
When the time came, I loaded up three big boxes of these papers, got my Get Smart on through four locked doors, and turned on the machine. I’d gotten about halfway through the third box when I heard a loud noise and the machine turned off. I tried turning it back on to no avail. I couldn’t get a hold of anyone who knew the machine well, so I sent and e-mail and went to lunch.
A couple of hours later, I got a personal visit to my desk, asking me to bring three or four other guys (all cleared Americans as well) to help me un-jam the machine. I was the only person available, but thankfully someone who knew the machine better than I joined me. We got on the floor, reached our hands up into the blade area, and stared pulling out half-shred paper. To make things worse, my little accident had put so much dust into the air that they had to turn off the air conditioning. I was up there an hour, in the tropical heat, bent over/kneeling, and fumbling through little scraps of paper. Half my day was spent destroying two boxes of trash and earning five paper cuts.
My suit is going to the dry cleaner’s this weekend, and on Monday my local staff is going to begin shredding the third box of documents, one at a time, through the little office shredder we have.
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Wow, that question didn’t come up on the exam…. Maybe that’ll be posed if I make it to the orals! Nice to know trash duty is part of the job, as it’s part of my regular household duties as well.