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My favorite part of dealing with the govt when I worked for a DoD contract
firme [SAIC] was that we had to accomodate certain peculiarities of our
point of contact [I forget his proper title]. On a huge omnibus contract,
this guy needed to find an error within the first fewe pgs. of a deliverable
[our deliverables were binders, documenting the zillions of manhours spent
on stuff like SW maintenance, keeping COBOL code working, etc.].
So we would include on purpose 1 or 2 typos or simple mistakes on the first
or second page, which he could easily find and redline, then after he
perused 20-30 pgs more, he would shelve the binder and move on... he never
once acknowledged that he knew that we knew that he needed that sop to his
editor's pen, but it was the only way to deal with him. When I once tried to
submit a perfectly error-free set of documents, my much wiser manager
insisted we 'leave in' just the right flaws. He had learned earlier that an
error-free document earned far more wrath than it was worth... it forced our
contact to pore over hundreds of pages! totally unacceptable!
Our other secret workaround involved substituting keywords like processor
instead of computer or minicomputer [this was in the days of the DEC VAX
11780's reign] -- the contracts had originated so long before and been
renewed over & over with add-on provisions that these modern terms were too
new and would be non-compliant. So we performed a final pass before
submisison to substitute back in the old-fashioned acceptable terms -- we
kept a list posted to decode the special items! It was humorous then, it
would be quite absurd now.
We churned out proposals at a great rate, though we were often the
sole-source provider and could not be unseated. The amount of jiggering
needed to reshape résumés & align our resources to meet the RFP was
mind-bending -- lots of paste-up by graphic artists too!
What I miss most was that for some years we each got an office of our own...
what a concept, a door you can close & not have to filter out the
passers-by. Later we fell prey to cubicle madness...
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