Please don't call me

One of the less exciting aspects of being a Foreign Service officer is when you serve as duty officer. Those are the weeks when all the after-hours “emergency” phone calls go directly to you. If an American gets arrested during non-business hours, you make sure they are treated no worse than anybody else in that jail. If an American dies, you try to track down next of kin. If an American is mugged, you help them contact family to wire them money. It’s an important and necessary job. But I would spend those weeks praying that I wouldn’t get a phone call, and especially not a phone call in the middle of the night. Or if I did, that I would wake up and answer the phone right away! (One excellent way to get in trouble is for the DCM to get woken up because you didn’t answer the duty phone. Praise God, that never happened to me.)

When I was in Brazil, more often than not, those “emergency” phone calls were not actual emergencies. On the rare occasion when it was a legitimate call, I was lucky enough to have them fall under other consular jurisdictions, so all I had to do was call the duty officer in Rio or Sao Paulo or Recife and pass on the info. Hallelujah! But the majority of my phone calls were not emergencies, and I had to tell the person that we couldn’t help them or to call back during business hours. Tokyo, on the other hand, is a major city that actually gets a fair number of American citizens, so I suspect I will not get off so easily when I am stationed there. In an effort to make my life easier, here are just a few tips to keep in mind before you call up the Embassy after hours if you or a loved one are in Japan sometime between September 2012 and August 2015. (And PLEASE remember the time difference!)

* The fact that you are leaving for the U.S. tomorrow and you just realized that you forgot to get a visa for the nanny is not an emergency. (This obviously only applies to citizens of countries for which we require a visa.)

* The fact that your husband has enrolled your kids in school and declared that you will be staying is not an emergency. (People watch too many movies. The Marines are at the Embassy to protect classified material, not to swoop in on a helicopter to pull your teenagers out of school.)

* The Embassy does not have a fleet of planes waiting to be used by American citizens with various medical conditions.

* The U.S. government does not have a fund to fly friends or family to the bedside of somebody who got the flu/malaria/etc while in a foreign country. (I’ve gotten this one the most. Would you ask the government to fly you to another state? No. Under certain conditions, this would be a “welfare and whereabouts” call, where we would locate the person and make sure they are still living. That's about it.)

* While I don’t encourage people to get their pictures taken with alligators, getting your picture taken with an alligator while you are drunk and in the middle of nowhere is NEVER a good idea.