I’ve often written about people who shake up their lives.

Now it’s my turn. But, first one more last tale.

I got this e-mail recently from Terry Vice: “I am the guy that contacted you two years ago about the article you did on the gentleman in the Foreign Service. Thanks in part to your article, I’m now in the Foreign Service in Madrid.”

Vice was referring to a 2008 story I wrote about Rudy Garcia, who was mellowing in Monument after a long Foreign Service career that took him to such places as Africa and Nicaragua.

Inspired by Garcia’s adventures, Vice, 52, decided to give the Foreign Service a go — though it meant a mid-life job change and uprooting his family.

Look where it got him.

“Who’d have ever thought I’d be a diplomat?” Vice said by phone. “My wife got to meet the Queen of Spain. Living in Colorado Springs, I never thought about meeting a queen.”

Vice is now “el jefe”  (the chief) of maintenance at Madrid’s U.S. Embassy. He’s the one to call when the AC goes out or the ballroom needs painting. Plus he has 100 houses to manage.

He speaks little Spanish and heads a crew of 24 tradesmen who speak little English.

No problemo. “A building is a building,” he said.

As a young buck, Vice worked as a Greeley cop, but changed gears after a thug resisting arrest cost him 100 stitches in his face. He spent many years as a State Farm facility manager. He was a real estate broker when the foreign service beckoned.

“I wanted to serve my country,” Vice said. “I had never been in the military.”

At 50, he took the State Department test, hired on, trained six months in D.C. and awaited orders, which change every two years. “I didn’t know where we were going. I just knew it was somewhere in the world.”

There are about 265 embassy, consulate and missions posts worldwide. Vice’s possibilities included Bulgaria, Tunisia, Botswana and Morocco.

He got Spain, his first choice for the move with his wife, Leslie, and kids Hillary, 18, and Tyler, 16.

Vice sold his Springs home, but shipped his Toyota 4Runner, a monster on European streets packed with subcompact cars.

“Some of those cars I swear I could wear as tennis shoes,” Vice said. “I’m 6-foot-1 and weigh an eighth of a ton.”

In a nation of night revelers, the fuddy-duddy American rolls into work at 6 a.m. “Everybody thinks I’m nuts.”

Maybe so, but he gets “a generous base salary” from his gig.

And, as Garcia put it in his story: “If you don’t like your boss, you’ll have a new one in two years.”

I like my boss and I’m not as exotic as Vice. But I’m outta here, too.

I’m moving for my husband’s job to Mukilteo, Wash., a ferry town with a lighthouse, not an embassy.

This is my last Your Space. Please don’t make me cry, but you can contact me at: reporterbrown@gmail.com

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Interested in the Foreign Service? Go to: http://careers.state.gov/

Contact Vice at tlvice@tlvice.com

At an age when many men are counting the years to retirement, Colorado Springs native Terry Vice, 52, applied for the Foreign Service. He and his family moved to Madrid a year ago. Photo by Courtesy photo

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Vice poses in front of Vice President Joe Biden’s limo on the VP’s visit to Madrid Photo by Courtesy photo

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Hillary Vice, 18, with new BFF Photo by Courtesy photo