HOTO

There are lots of new terms and acronyms around here, and one of my favorites is HOTO (pronounced hoe-toe). It stands for Hand Over / Take Over, and it refers to the process of transferring responsibility from a departing person to an incoming person. As you might imagine, the HO part is more fun than the TO part.

My predecessor and I overlapped by several days, so he walked me through a lot of parts of the job. Naturally, much of the learning required actually doing it, and of course a lot of things have changed in the past 6 months, but it was nice to be able to have that face-to-face HOTO.

My replacement won't be quite so lucky. He's currently scheduled to arrive 3 days after I 'm scheduled to leave. We may overlap in Manas, but no guarantee there. It's not an unusual situation - as far as I can tell, people have about a 50/50 chance of an in-person HOTO.

So I'm writing a lot of notes, doing a lot of email and training other people in the office so they can do the face-to-face portion in my absence. The biggest downside is that I won't be able to introduce him to the various people around base he'll need to work with. But the good thing is it's such a small base, he'll meet them all within the first week anyway. Also, this job isn't terribly technical or tricky, so I'm confident he'll pick it up just fine.