Typical Day
Ron McShmoozer is a foreign service officer with nine years of experience working overseas. He speaks Spanish and French, and has been assigned to Ecuador, Jordan, and Romania. He was working on his Romanian when he was suddenly reassigned to the embassy in Vienna, Austria. So it's apparently time for him to scrap the Romanian and start working on his German. Luckily Vienna is such a cosmopolitan city that you can get away with only speaking English.
Ron's goal since high school was to be in the Foreign Service. Though plenty of his experiences have been surprises, it has generally lived up to his hopes. This is largely because Ron didn't have too many unrealistic illusions about diplomatic work. He read up enough before even taking the Foreign Service Exam that he understood while the occasional cocktail party with high rollers would come around, most of his day-to-day life would be diplomatic grunt work. Nowhere was this more true than Romania. Vienna is a definite step up, and Ron couldn't have been more thrilled to get his new assignment.
Vienna is a city that gets a lot more high profile traffic than Bucharest, Romania. Ron's work schedule has increased significantly. In fact, a team of two Congressmen and two Senators are coming through next week to meet with some U.N. officials and they've chosen the embassy as their meeting place. McShmoozer is on the preparation committee. He hasn't been able to work on the visit today though, because he's had a steady stream of other busy work thrust on him.
First there were the reports due to his boss yesterday, but he totally spaced on them and had to finish this morning. Then there was the Russian who walked into the embassy this morning and spotted Ron walking through the lobby. He claimed he had information to sell and for some reason seemed to think Ron was the man to share it with. Even after Ron escorted him to the security office, he insisted Ron stay. Turns out he defected from the old USSR years ago but still thinks Big Brother is watching him. He tries to sell the embassy "information" about how Moscow is still spying on him once or twice a month.
Finally, after escaping Sergei the spy, Ron has a chance to meet with the rest of the preparation committee and check on how things are progressing. Not too well, it seems. It turns out the U.N. officials have made some unusual requests.
"Wait, the U.N. Undersecretary for Project Services wants what?" Ron wasn't sure he'd heard correctly.
"He wants a dozen Parrot's Beaks in his room. His staff is pretty insistent," his deputy replied.
"Why on earth does he want Parrot's Beaks? Is it for some soup or something his staff makes?"
"No, no. It's a flower."
"There's a flower called Parrot's Beak." Ron had heard a lot of weird requests, but this one was definitely up there.
"Apparently." His deputy was pretty usually unflappable, but looked a little flustered now. He'd been working on this for a while.
"Can we get them?"
"No. They're from the Canary Islands."
"Oh," Ron said. Well, now what, he wondered.
"Well, maybe our consulate there can send us...."
"And they're extinct," his deputy added, without so much as a smile.
"They're what?"
"Extinct," he said again. "At least they are in the wild. They keep some in arboretums, or whatever you call those places that just grow plants."
Ron shook his head. "And they're not budging on this? What does he ask for when he travels and the U.S. isn't hosting him?"
"I don't know," his assistant replied, "but they're not budging, so we need to think of something. I've already called around to some floral designers and found a woman who thinks she can make some fake ones and all she wants for payment is citizenship for her four cousins, and she...."
Ron wasn't listening anymore. He put his forehead in his hand. He liked his job, but it was already time for dinner, and his work wasn't anywhere near over.