Part of Travel and consular services
6th March 2013 London, UK
Switching night and day – life in the Global Response Centre
In the lead up to International Women’s Day on Friday, we are featuring the stories of women who work for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as guest articles across the FCO bloggers’ network.
Carole Johnson is a Team Leader in the FCO’s Global Response Centre (GRC). It operates around the clock, 365 days a year, taking calls from British Nationals in trouble overseas, from our network of more than 260 missions across the world and from colleagues across Government.
We work a night shift one week in five. For those seven days, my world is turned upside down. I try to eat ‘normally’ and start the day with dinner before I come into work. Others find it easier to work as though night were day, and start the shift with breakfast, followed by lunch and dinner as the night progresses – one of my team can quite happily tuck into a curry at 5.00am!
As the FCO out-of-hours team, we rely heavily on on-call duty officers in London and around the world for support. The consular cases we deal with range widely, from lost passports, hospitalisations, deaths and arrests, through to more difficult abuse and abduction cases.
Missing persons are common – most turn up alive, some do not. And when that happens we all feel it – missing teenagers hit me hardest, reminding me of my two who are away at school and university. We escalate very urgent cases to our officers on the ground to deal with personally. The willingness and dedication of our staff abroad who help British Nationals knows no bounds.
Big events happen in an instant and we monitor the media constantly. It could be anything – a plane crash, cruise disaster, or political crisis.
To know what GRC are working on at any given time, just look at the news headlines.
I applied to work here after personal experience as Deputy High Commissioner in Malta responsible for the Libya evacuations. During this time, I got support from the GRC day and night over several months. GRC also works on tasks for Ministerial private offices out-of-hours, including commissioning briefing from policy teams, amending travel advice and liaising with other Government Departments.
In the job, you start to notice strange patterns – like the large number of earthquakes that occur around the world each day; and also the unfortunate frequency of scams. We make sure callers who find themselves in these situations can access help and information.
A bowl of muesli accompanies the usual flurry of calls towards the end of the night and, having handed over to the incoming shift, I head home to bed. I fall asleep within minutes, enjoying the irrational guilty pleasure of sleeping during the day.