ancona
Praying Mantis
My last three or four weeks have been a bizarre journey through a thick fog of incompetence, mismanagement, confusion and general malaise. I’ve been working on a negotiated procurement with a member of a “protected class” of federal contractor, which is evolving in to a quest for sanity among the insane. There are times [with this being one of them] when I question whether or not I am the sole survivor of a lost race; a remnant of an earlier time when things were taken at face value because those presenting them were in a position of trust and relative power, and because those same people were presumed to have earned their positions as a result of career focused education, hard work and dedication. Apparently this is no longer the case in our convoluted business world. Years and years of social engineering coupled with an even longer period of government intervention, precipitated by whining special interest groups, and tiny minorities of the population demanding a leg up against the evil white man, have irretrievably altered the landscape. In this new, modern and enlightened age of business it is no longer a prerequisite to have a complete education, nor is it requisite to possess any level of sincere motivation to excel on any particular level of your chosen field of endeavor, the sole remaining requirement is that you must be able to propel yourself on two legs, utilize oxygen and speak a little bit of English.
The 8-A program is a contracting program for minorities which allows minority firm to simply negotiate procurements up to a maximum value of three million dollars per project, with no upper limit of gross total procurement. This means there is zero competition, close to zero percent chance of failure and very nearly guaranteed profit on every single project for a ten year period. Once your ten years are up it doesn’t mean you’re out though, because you can enter in to a 51% - 49% teaming agreement with a newly christened 8-A contractor and do it for ten more years using the Mentor-Protégé Program started by the SBA. You can also form a completely new company by simply seeking out a minority partner and go for ten more years.
Here is where the rubber meets the road. A month or so ago, I was approached by my partner who is the president and majority owner of our firm, asking me [well……directing me really] to call a woman he met to discuss helping her out with required submissions surrounding a project she negotiated with the Army Corps of Engineers, and to hold her hand through the process of document compilation, interpretation of specifications and organization of her project. When I inquired about renumeration and timelines I was told we were doing this pro bono, and that if this project went well we would form either a joint venture or a teaming agreement with this firm so we could negotiate a significant portion of our work, thereby removing a lot of the doubt currently surrounding our prospects for survival in the worst contracting drought in the history of the earth. On its face, it looked too good to be true, but I dove in head first anyway.
Armed with a phone number and a name, I rolled down to my office and made the call. The voice on the other end of the line was articulate, seemingly intelligent, and excited yet something didn’t quite feel right. After fifteen more minutes of introductions and small talk I requested all of the documents I would need to get going on submittals and work plans. A short while later I received about five e-mails with various attachments. Going through and trying to organize the information, I started coming across poorly written plans with glaring punctuation, grammar and spelling errors. Once I went through the submittal register, which is the list of required plans, documents and cut-sheets /I needed to gather, write and submit, I realized why we were enlisted to help. This woman had absolutely no clue what she was doing and was already two months in to the process yet had accomplished nearly nothing, with the notable exception of completely pissing off her Contracting Officer and his technical representative. Her plans were all total disasters and needed to be re-written from scratch. I went over to the old mans’ office and before I could say a word he held up his hand and said, “I know……I know”. So, I asked him when he was planning on telling me this woman was a clueless idiot, who by all that is right should never have been given a business license in the first place, and should definitely have never gotten in to government contracting which is the most paperwork intensive field of contracting outside the nuclear industry. He paused for a minute, kind of looking down at the floor while slowly shaking his head in somber acknowledgement. After a very long pause he said that although the project wasn’t even started it was already completely fucked up, but that if we could somehow un-fuck it, she would have few alternatives to working with us, at least for the foreseeable future, and that was the shot in the arm we could use to assure our survival. I was now read in completely, yet somehow even more uneasy than I was when I walked in.
Keeping in mind that I was born without the capacity to tolerate incompetence, stupidity, needy people and bullshit, I forced myself to return to the task immediately at hand and begin producing the quality documents demanded by the Army Corps of Engineers, but not before deleting all of the half assed shit-quality garbage this woman sent me. Now, I’m that team player who doesn’t like to define straight and impenetrable lines of responsibility, believing that there are some tasks which are best delegated to other people and tasks that I must do myself. I proceeded to devote the next four weeks of my life to supplying the best work I have ever produced. When I finished the final manual, the Contractor Quality Control Manual, it was with a palpable sense of relief and a sense of pride in my accomplishment, and that my Team managed [I thought] to un-fuck what came in to my office as a completely knotted up ball of fuck. Hopefully a month of seventy five hour weeks would be worth the effort.
During the entire time, when I had a question about some portion of the work scope or needed additional information of some sort, I would call the 8-A contractor and she would simply talk in circles, playing the “I just need some help” card, or using the race card saying, “Well, the Contracting Officer is Puerto Rican, and I can tell he hates black people and is just making it harder on me than he should be”. As time wore on, I stopped calling her because it became clear that not only was she incompetent, she was a chronic whiner who blamed her own failures on others while all the time believing with all her heart that she was somehow being held back because she is a black woman. By the time I stopped calling her, we were only a few days away from completing this mountain of paperwork. The finished packages weighed in at sixty pounds. I delivered seven work plans, each one bound and tabbed to include table of contents, outline and appendixes. In addition, there was an Environmental Compliance and Protection Plan, Storm-water Pollution Protection Plan, Hazardous Materials Abatement and Control Plan, Site Specific Accident Prevention and Health/Safety Plan, Contractor Quality Control Plan, Trenching and Shoring Plan in compliance with the Trenching and Shoring Trench Safety Act and a Solid Waste Management and Waste Reduction Plan in compliance with LEED Silver Rating requirements along with sixteen bundles of MSDS sheets, product cut-sheets and product compliance data sheets.
I personally loaded all of this material in to my truck and drove it over to the Orlando office of the Army Corps of Engineers and dropped it off at the receiving desk. I got my time stamped receipt and rolled on down the road, feeling pretty good about the world, and that maybe this would work out after all.
An hour later I returned to the office and got right back in to work I had neglected while working on the submittals I just delivered. Near the end of the day, I heard the old man in his office getting uncharacteristically shitty with someone over the phone. The conversation was pretty one sided, with the old man dominating whomever was getting a world class ass chewing. The noise subsided and I heard the phone being slammed back in the cradle. A few minutes later he was standing in my doorway with that “killing look” in his eyes, sort of searching for words. After a full minute, he says to me, “You are not going to believe this shit…..not in a million years will you guess what just fucking happened, and what that fucking cunt has been doing”. I don’t care who you are, that was pretty chilling and I immediately felt sick in my stomach.
Apparently, our new 8-A friend held back a few important details when she came begging to our office with outstretched hands asking for “a little bit of help”. While she told us the negotiations for the procurement had just been completed, and she was only a few weeks behind schedule on her paperwork, in truth she was actually finished negotiating last August, and was given SIX time extensions to get her paperwork right. To add insult to injury, this fucking retarded numbskull kept re-submitting her poorly written, grammatically incoherent seventh grade quality work plans, and had them repeatedly and summarily rejected even as we were compiling the same documents for her. Naturally, she failed to mention any of this to me or the old man during the forty thousand phone calls she made in complete and total panic nearly every day, multiple times a day. She also failed to mention that she wasn’t actually a general contractor, but that she hired a man to work for her and qualify the company with his license, but not his assistance; a rubber stamp man.
On to the meat of the matter. When the old man got her call that afternoon, she essentially told him that the government was cancelling the contract using a “Cancel for Convenience” clause available to the government as a sort of catch-all bail out clause. It allows them to pay the contractor their expected profit on a job and for nearly any reason imaginable, to cancel it. When he asked her why they cancelled the project, she came clean to him and told him the whole story. To add insult to injury, we were on the list of participating sub-contractors she submitted to the government to identify all participants in the negotiated work. This is submitted for reasons of accountability and [supposedly] to reduce the possibility of fraud and collusion in the procurement process.
The next morning, we got a call from the Contracting Officer who wanted to let us know he received the submittals we prepared and that although the procurement was cancelled he wanted to acknowledge that we had provided the cleanest and most complete set of submittals he ever received, and the he hoped to work with our firm in the future. It was nice to get a compliment such as that from the USACE, but it was also small consolation for the effort we put forth for this woman. The failure of this program to weed out incompetent idiots such as this one simply cements my view that set-asides serve only to remove viable contracts from the stream of competitive contracting and hand them to people who are unable to compete in the real world not as a result of discrimination, either real or perceived, but as a result of incompetence; pure and simple.
Having wasted an entire month on this idiot, and having spent twenty thousand dollars in salaries and resources, we walk away with absolutely nothing but the knowledge that this woman will be given chance after chance after chance, and each time she fails it will still be my fault.
So, I’m sitting in my barcolounger mindlessly watching NCIS and eating Stouffers microwave ready macaroni and cheese while simultaneously contemplating the significance of this whole fiasco. It is becoming increasingly clear that when the lights go out, there will be far more people with no hope of survival than I previously though possible, even in the most dire of circumstances. When I made my assumptions, I only included the entitled class that receives visible assistance such as SNAP, TANF, WIC etc. I completely forgot the folks who walk among us appearing outwardly to be successful, educated, hard-working people, for which without the direct subsidy of set-aside policies utilized by the government would likely have a job at the local Wal-Mart or Home Depot. I won’t get started on the myriad programs and set-asides out there folks, but it is tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars annually.
As each successive generation of government educated automatons enters society, it seems that America gets just a little bit less civilized and a little bit more socialized as the dominant theme becomes more about egalitarianism rather than individuality and original thinking. The more we out-cast free thinkers and freedom lovers, the closer we all come to the end of empire.
Got preps?
Sorry about the selfish rant.
The 8-A program is a contracting program for minorities which allows minority firm to simply negotiate procurements up to a maximum value of three million dollars per project, with no upper limit of gross total procurement. This means there is zero competition, close to zero percent chance of failure and very nearly guaranteed profit on every single project for a ten year period. Once your ten years are up it doesn’t mean you’re out though, because you can enter in to a 51% - 49% teaming agreement with a newly christened 8-A contractor and do it for ten more years using the Mentor-Protégé Program started by the SBA. You can also form a completely new company by simply seeking out a minority partner and go for ten more years.
Here is where the rubber meets the road. A month or so ago, I was approached by my partner who is the president and majority owner of our firm, asking me [well……directing me really] to call a woman he met to discuss helping her out with required submissions surrounding a project she negotiated with the Army Corps of Engineers, and to hold her hand through the process of document compilation, interpretation of specifications and organization of her project. When I inquired about renumeration and timelines I was told we were doing this pro bono, and that if this project went well we would form either a joint venture or a teaming agreement with this firm so we could negotiate a significant portion of our work, thereby removing a lot of the doubt currently surrounding our prospects for survival in the worst contracting drought in the history of the earth. On its face, it looked too good to be true, but I dove in head first anyway.
Armed with a phone number and a name, I rolled down to my office and made the call. The voice on the other end of the line was articulate, seemingly intelligent, and excited yet something didn’t quite feel right. After fifteen more minutes of introductions and small talk I requested all of the documents I would need to get going on submittals and work plans. A short while later I received about five e-mails with various attachments. Going through and trying to organize the information, I started coming across poorly written plans with glaring punctuation, grammar and spelling errors. Once I went through the submittal register, which is the list of required plans, documents and cut-sheets /I needed to gather, write and submit, I realized why we were enlisted to help. This woman had absolutely no clue what she was doing and was already two months in to the process yet had accomplished nearly nothing, with the notable exception of completely pissing off her Contracting Officer and his technical representative. Her plans were all total disasters and needed to be re-written from scratch. I went over to the old mans’ office and before I could say a word he held up his hand and said, “I know……I know”. So, I asked him when he was planning on telling me this woman was a clueless idiot, who by all that is right should never have been given a business license in the first place, and should definitely have never gotten in to government contracting which is the most paperwork intensive field of contracting outside the nuclear industry. He paused for a minute, kind of looking down at the floor while slowly shaking his head in somber acknowledgement. After a very long pause he said that although the project wasn’t even started it was already completely fucked up, but that if we could somehow un-fuck it, she would have few alternatives to working with us, at least for the foreseeable future, and that was the shot in the arm we could use to assure our survival. I was now read in completely, yet somehow even more uneasy than I was when I walked in.
Keeping in mind that I was born without the capacity to tolerate incompetence, stupidity, needy people and bullshit, I forced myself to return to the task immediately at hand and begin producing the quality documents demanded by the Army Corps of Engineers, but not before deleting all of the half assed shit-quality garbage this woman sent me. Now, I’m that team player who doesn’t like to define straight and impenetrable lines of responsibility, believing that there are some tasks which are best delegated to other people and tasks that I must do myself. I proceeded to devote the next four weeks of my life to supplying the best work I have ever produced. When I finished the final manual, the Contractor Quality Control Manual, it was with a palpable sense of relief and a sense of pride in my accomplishment, and that my Team managed [I thought] to un-fuck what came in to my office as a completely knotted up ball of fuck. Hopefully a month of seventy five hour weeks would be worth the effort.
During the entire time, when I had a question about some portion of the work scope or needed additional information of some sort, I would call the 8-A contractor and she would simply talk in circles, playing the “I just need some help” card, or using the race card saying, “Well, the Contracting Officer is Puerto Rican, and I can tell he hates black people and is just making it harder on me than he should be”. As time wore on, I stopped calling her because it became clear that not only was she incompetent, she was a chronic whiner who blamed her own failures on others while all the time believing with all her heart that she was somehow being held back because she is a black woman. By the time I stopped calling her, we were only a few days away from completing this mountain of paperwork. The finished packages weighed in at sixty pounds. I delivered seven work plans, each one bound and tabbed to include table of contents, outline and appendixes. In addition, there was an Environmental Compliance and Protection Plan, Storm-water Pollution Protection Plan, Hazardous Materials Abatement and Control Plan, Site Specific Accident Prevention and Health/Safety Plan, Contractor Quality Control Plan, Trenching and Shoring Plan in compliance with the Trenching and Shoring Trench Safety Act and a Solid Waste Management and Waste Reduction Plan in compliance with LEED Silver Rating requirements along with sixteen bundles of MSDS sheets, product cut-sheets and product compliance data sheets.
I personally loaded all of this material in to my truck and drove it over to the Orlando office of the Army Corps of Engineers and dropped it off at the receiving desk. I got my time stamped receipt and rolled on down the road, feeling pretty good about the world, and that maybe this would work out after all.
An hour later I returned to the office and got right back in to work I had neglected while working on the submittals I just delivered. Near the end of the day, I heard the old man in his office getting uncharacteristically shitty with someone over the phone. The conversation was pretty one sided, with the old man dominating whomever was getting a world class ass chewing. The noise subsided and I heard the phone being slammed back in the cradle. A few minutes later he was standing in my doorway with that “killing look” in his eyes, sort of searching for words. After a full minute, he says to me, “You are not going to believe this shit…..not in a million years will you guess what just fucking happened, and what that fucking cunt has been doing”. I don’t care who you are, that was pretty chilling and I immediately felt sick in my stomach.
Apparently, our new 8-A friend held back a few important details when she came begging to our office with outstretched hands asking for “a little bit of help”. While she told us the negotiations for the procurement had just been completed, and she was only a few weeks behind schedule on her paperwork, in truth she was actually finished negotiating last August, and was given SIX time extensions to get her paperwork right. To add insult to injury, this fucking retarded numbskull kept re-submitting her poorly written, grammatically incoherent seventh grade quality work plans, and had them repeatedly and summarily rejected even as we were compiling the same documents for her. Naturally, she failed to mention any of this to me or the old man during the forty thousand phone calls she made in complete and total panic nearly every day, multiple times a day. She also failed to mention that she wasn’t actually a general contractor, but that she hired a man to work for her and qualify the company with his license, but not his assistance; a rubber stamp man.
On to the meat of the matter. When the old man got her call that afternoon, she essentially told him that the government was cancelling the contract using a “Cancel for Convenience” clause available to the government as a sort of catch-all bail out clause. It allows them to pay the contractor their expected profit on a job and for nearly any reason imaginable, to cancel it. When he asked her why they cancelled the project, she came clean to him and told him the whole story. To add insult to injury, we were on the list of participating sub-contractors she submitted to the government to identify all participants in the negotiated work. This is submitted for reasons of accountability and [supposedly] to reduce the possibility of fraud and collusion in the procurement process.
The next morning, we got a call from the Contracting Officer who wanted to let us know he received the submittals we prepared and that although the procurement was cancelled he wanted to acknowledge that we had provided the cleanest and most complete set of submittals he ever received, and the he hoped to work with our firm in the future. It was nice to get a compliment such as that from the USACE, but it was also small consolation for the effort we put forth for this woman. The failure of this program to weed out incompetent idiots such as this one simply cements my view that set-asides serve only to remove viable contracts from the stream of competitive contracting and hand them to people who are unable to compete in the real world not as a result of discrimination, either real or perceived, but as a result of incompetence; pure and simple.
Having wasted an entire month on this idiot, and having spent twenty thousand dollars in salaries and resources, we walk away with absolutely nothing but the knowledge that this woman will be given chance after chance after chance, and each time she fails it will still be my fault.
So, I’m sitting in my barcolounger mindlessly watching NCIS and eating Stouffers microwave ready macaroni and cheese while simultaneously contemplating the significance of this whole fiasco. It is becoming increasingly clear that when the lights go out, there will be far more people with no hope of survival than I previously though possible, even in the most dire of circumstances. When I made my assumptions, I only included the entitled class that receives visible assistance such as SNAP, TANF, WIC etc. I completely forgot the folks who walk among us appearing outwardly to be successful, educated, hard-working people, for which without the direct subsidy of set-aside policies utilized by the government would likely have a job at the local Wal-Mart or Home Depot. I won’t get started on the myriad programs and set-asides out there folks, but it is tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars annually.
As each successive generation of government educated automatons enters society, it seems that America gets just a little bit less civilized and a little bit more socialized as the dominant theme becomes more about egalitarianism rather than individuality and original thinking. The more we out-cast free thinkers and freedom lovers, the closer we all come to the end of empire.
Got preps?
Sorry about the selfish rant.
ffftt:
