Days 151 – 153: Jakarta

I caught a flight from Bali to Jakarta on March 5^th; my Foreign Service Officer Test was scheduled for the morning of the 6^th at the US Embassy in central Jakarta. The flight took only an hour and a half, but the 35km bus ride from the airport to the center of the city took a full two hours due to heavy traffic. Jakarta’s streets, it seems, are just as clogged as Bangkok’s and nearly as wild as Saigon’s. I finally checked into my guesthouse around six, and proceeded to kill about twenty mosquitoes in my room in the next fifteen minutes. That didn’t stop me from waking up the following morning to a new patch of bites, though.

I arrived at the Embassy a half hour before my test was to begin, but at the security check no one seemed to understand what I was doing there. I showed my letter and told the security staff that I was there for an exam, but they routed me to the consular section, where I waited in line for fifteen minutes before being told that I was in the wrong place. Someone finally escorted me to the USAID building just in time for my test to start.

When I got to the testing room I realized why no one had known where I was supposed to go: I was the only one taking the test in Jakarta. And, as the test administrator told me, they hadn’t even expected me to show up—because I had only listed my North Carolina address on my application, they figured I must have selected the Jakarta test center by accident. I guess they hadn’t considered the possibility that I’d want to take the test in Jakarta even though I don’t live there.

Unlike the last time I took the exam, in April 2005, the test is now fully computerized; everything from the multiple choice sections to the essay is completed online. But as we all know, technology can make things both easier and more difficult, and that proved true when I attempted to log into the test site and it rejected my User ID. The test administrator called a technology guy in to work on the problem, but in the end he had to call someone back in the US to figure out what the problem was. Half an hour of twiddling my thumbs later, I was finally able to log in.

Everything went smoothly until about midway through the biographical information section of the exam, when my web browser suddenly shut down because of a “severe time synch error.” I don’t even know what that means, and neither did the technology guy who had stayed in the room ever since my first problem, but in the end my computer had to be restarted and I lost the entire section of answers and hard to start over. I’m just glad the State Department managed to work all the kinks out of this new testing system before they put it into production.

I finally finished the exam nearly an hour after the supposed ending time, and I silently thanked my lucky stars that I hadn’t tried to schedule a flight out of Jakarta for that afternoon. Rain swept through the city for the remainder of the day, so I spent the rest of my time in Jakarta reading and intermittently swatting mosquitoes in my prison cell of a hotel room. In the morning I’d be off to Borneo.