Welcome to the Team

About the time we were preparing to leave Columbia, I applied for a communications position with the Disaster Response Division of the Small Business Administration. I’ve done some disaster response work before. I like the challenge of working in that environment, so I thought it would be worth submitting my application. 

I expected the process of applying for a job with the Federal government to be a lengthy one, so I wasn’t concerned that I had a few months to go on my current job. Then the Federal government shut down at the first of October, and I expected the hiring process to pause. Surprisingly, it did not. I kept getting more forms to fill out. I’d turn them in, then get more forms with new deadlines. 

At one point I was asked to do a background check, which required me to report to the Federal building in downtown Tacoma with my original birth certificate, social security card and passport and get fingerprinted. 

Then I got an email that said “Welcome to the team!” I hadn’t interviewed at this point, or spoken to a real person, even over the phone. I was told the first step would be a five-day training, to be scheduled later, and it would be online. I took an oath of office, basically saying I would support the Constitution, with a real person over Zoom. This was my first interaction with a real person, other than the lady who fingerprinted me. 

The federal government was still shut down at this point. I figured they wouldn’t even start scheduling the training until the shutdown was over, and then it would be well into the future. 

I was wrong. I was invited to the training, which was to be five days in person. I had learned through the process that this was an on-demand job only. Public information officers got activated in the event of a federally declared disaster. You would go to the area and disseminate information to encourage people to apply for federally subsidized loans for their businesses that had been affected by disaster. I was in the Western Division, which meant everything west of the Mississippi River. There were five federal disasters ongoing, a few related to flooding and I think one related to fire. Most had happened more than a year ago. 

You only get paid when you are activated. I was asked if I wanted to put down my availability as one month, two months or three months. I said one. I assumed this meant the available time I could be called in for a few days. 

The in-person training was in California. My current issue of the magazine I was working for was in good shape, and I had some time off built up, so taking off a week was workable. They sent me a credit card for travel expenses, and booked a flight and hotel room. 

When I looked at the flight, I didn’t see a return time. I called to ask about my return time, and they said once I completed the training, I would be deployed. I wouldn’t be returning, I would be sent out for a month, and would return sometime after that. It was a literal one-way ticket. 

On the day that I got the request to attend, my boss and her boss at my current job were in the air, flying to South Korea, to be followed by flying to the Philippines. Both are kind and generous people, and would have been understanding about my premature departure. But even though I had the November issue of the magazine well in hand, I still had the December issue, my last issue, to go. I had been working on the cover story for months, as well as other stories. I may have been 75% of the way there content-wise, but I didn’t have anything in a form that I could just hand off to someone else. My handwritten notes would have been pretty worthless. So being gone for a month plus wasn’t really something I could consider doing. After spending 24 years at my current job, I didn’t want to abruptly leave, leaving things undone. 

So I told the SBA I would have to pass. They said ok, and that they would get back in touch when the next training was scheduled after the holidays. We’re after the holidays now, but I’m not holding my breath. If they had enough people successfully complete the first training, they probably don’t need to run another class through already. 

My biggest surprise about the whole thing was that once you are deployed, you stay there. I asked if you could return home during a deployment, and they said it has occasionally happened in the event of a family emergency. It was like a military deployment. I had a hard time getting my head around why a Public Information Officer would need to be on location at a disaster area seven days a week when it’s more than a year post-disaster. It seems like you could work five days and fly home for two. It also seems like a lot of the work could be done remotely. I guess if they end up calling me back I’ll find out.