As I said at the beginning of my post, I generally agree with Stan on Chargees. I thought it was, however, useful to point out that that some are quite good at taking charge. I admit that it's rare. Ran into one DCM (was Chargee while Amb was out of town) who was really afraid of his own shadow. the only good thing he did was to schedule an appointment for me with the AMB.

Back in the dark ages of the 1960s, when I was doing my doctoral research in Peru, my dissertation advisor who was in country on a research project (for the first year of my work) characterized the Amb, whom he knew, as someone who would never make an error of commission. This guy was a careeer FSO - probably had been a Chargee more than once...

Cheers

JohnT