I work at the Management Section of the British Embassy. Our section is not in the limelight in fact, I don’t think anyone outside is aware of our existence but we are here and we have a very important role. When someone asks what we do, I usually say that we are the backbone of the Embassy and I haven’t found a better description over the years yet. We are the ones who help and assist diplomats and their families from the very beginning to the very end. We are the first to know of a new arrival, sometimes even a year before the actual date. Our job starts then. We identify suitable properties, cars, schools for the children, furnishing, and many more. Since humans are all different, everyone has their own style and ideas; there are not two cases that would be the same, so we never get bored. I can tell that one needs a lot of patience in our job, but it is also rewarding to see happy faces upon arrival, and throughout the four years of posting.

My job covers various duties, and although I have been doing it for seven years, I am never able to list all of them easily, I always miss something. Just to give you a taste, I deal with travel arrangements. I book flights for all my colleagues who travel on duty and to those who are invited by the Embassy to sponsor their journey to various conferences and courses in the UK. I also book hotel rooms for guests arriving, and it is one of the favourite bits of my work. Over the years I have visited (almost) all of the 5* hotels in Budapest and many 4* ones. I remember that at the beginning I was always embarrassed and excited before arriving, an ordinary citizen does not go to luxury hotels that often. I was amazed and I still am if I see a beautifully decorated room and the service they offer for the guests. Nowadays our two marker hotels feel like home, I know most of the rooms and have met lots of hotel staff who are all friendly and always ready for a chat. I am sure it is not only because I represent a valuable customer, but it is my personal aura that they like. :)

I have less exciting roles as well but I am happy with most of them. I am for example responsible for several budgets at the Embassy, one of them is cleaning. I also manage the Embassy Cleaners, who don’t need to be managed at all, they have been doing their job for so long. I still pretend sometimes that I am the leader, I think they secretly smile these times. I am also responsible for the furniture budget, I have to decide what we can afford and what we do not. It is quite tough sometimes, I had to learn to say no at a really early stage, I would have found myself in trouble otherwise, spending all the money too early.

There are several events I also organise or help to organise, one of the major events is the Remembrance Day service in the middle of November each year. There is a tiny cemetery just outside of Budapest, where there are dozens of tombstones of young pilots who were shot flying over Hungary. It is really shocking seeing how young some of them were when they died. There are many nations apart from UK, Polish, South African, Indian, Canadian, Australian, French, there is even one tombstone of a soldier from New Zealand. Remembrance Day is the 11th day of the 11th month each year, and there is a two-minute silence at 11 o’clock to remember the fallen and also to mark that end of World War I. The service is held on a Sunday closest to this date. It is an interesting service to observe, and we also ask the Police’s assistance to stop the traffic on the main road next to the cemetery for the two minutes silence. It does not always go like a clockwork, there was a year, when quite clearly the priest’s watch leading the ceremony was a bit ahead of the police guy’s and they stopped the traffic just after our two minutes silence was over. It was actually a good experience, it showed us that the traffic did not make that much noise after all, so we leave the drivers in peace ever since.

I am out of thoughts suddenly, and as usual, try to think of what else I do… I can see now that I write about everything, it would be so long, and no one would read it. So just a few more: I deal with mobile and landline phone contracts, and do a tender in every 4-5 years to find the best supplier, I do some accounting job on the FCO’s special computer based system, order business cards, update staff and contact database, order Christmas cards, or jump in to do job interviews if the HR Officer is not available.

Life is not boring, that’s for certain but this is one of the reasons I like my job and why I am still here after seven years. The other factor is that we are the kind of place where colleagues are not just colleagues but friends as well, and it makes the difference. We have a club in the building with a bar, which is open on Fridays and where we can go after a hard day or week, chat and have a few drinks together. It is a real British pub for us, and we sometimes joke with the fact that while in the building we are actually in the UK, not in Hungary.

A colleague once told me a story, which might be an urban myth but it might be true. She said that long, long years ago, in the nineties, she liked to check how smart a new love of hers was and told the man that each morning going to work at the Embassy she had to show her passport and got a stamp in it. The poor man, who believed the story, had to go.

Our club will be busy again in a week’s time, when we hold the very first St Patrick’s day party there. You may or may not know that St Patrick is one of the patron saints of Ireland and the Irish celebrate St Patrick’s day on the 17th of March. St Patrick is just as important to the people of Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK, as he is to the people of the Republic of Ireland. As a symbol of our close and very sociable relations with our Irish friends, we are organising the party together with the Irish Embassy. The club will be dressed in green for a day and there will be Irish dancers and an Irish folk band will play the music. There will be plenty of Guinness to celebrate and Irish food to fill the space left by the beer. It is a good initiative and I hope there will be more parties like this in the future. I hardly know any Iris people, although there are a lot living in Budapest, it will be great to meet them. I can’t wait to wear my green trousers and to listen to the Irish people speaking, it is so different from what I am used to and really fascinating! I will write about the party afterwards and once my hangover is gone :)

Andrea Szabó

Assistant Management Officer
7 March 2008