Buh.

Back in May, my office submitted a proposal. (Wait let me back up; not all my readers are government contractors: What happens is, one government entity or another -- for us, it's usually one of the military branches or the DoD -- issues a Request For Proposal, which is basically a description of work they'd like done, and then any companies or groups of companies that want to get the job have to submit a proposal detailing how they'd do it and how much it would cost. This is a gross oversimplification, mind you, but that's the idea.)

This was about 150 pages total, split into six physical binders, with tabbed dividers for each section, five or six copies of each binder. This is all pretty standard stuff, mind you. That was in May.

Last Thursday, the government sent us back about 50 things they wanted us to change in our proposal. Some of them were significant, like, "You didn't talk about this section here." And some of them were trivial like, "We don't like the acronym you're using for the project name." (Yes, seriously.)

At any rate, they wanted us to make the changes and resubmit the proposal -- but all the parts that we changed, they wanted us to print on blue paper. Which, I hardly need to tell you, is a pain in the ass, because we had to physically print each section, figure out which pages were changed, and then reprint those pages on blue and swap them out. Still about 150 pages, still in six binders, with tabs, and still needing five or six copies of each binder.

Oh, and they wanted it today. Tuesday. Five calendar days from when they sent us the comments, including an entire weekend.

Which is why I was at work for five and a half hours on Sunday, and twelve and a half hours yesterday. I wasn't even doing any writing. I was just helping with the printing and assembly of all those freaking binders. (33 binders, total. It took 3 boxes to pack it all up.)

At 7:30 last night, we finally decided that it wasn't perfect but there wasn't time to fix the remaining errors, and we shoved it in the boxes (with the CD of the electronic files and the various official submission letters) and taped them shut (with the company name and contract number written in black marker on at least two sides of each box) and packed it into a co-worker's car so she could drive up to DC, spend the night, and turn up in the appropriate government office this morning at 7. (This is probably why almost every even moderately-sized corporation in the country has at least one office somewhere near DC -- otherwise you have to do all these lightning turn-arounds and leave in a buffer for FedEx. And occasionally the issuing office gets snippy and doesn't want to wait for FedEx's by-10 delivery; they want it by 8 or 9 in the morning on the day of. Bureaucracy is an amazing thing.)

So, yeah. It's Tuesday morning and I've already got 18 hours on the books for the week. I'd take a day off, except that tomorrow is the kindergarten assessment for Penny's school, and next week (which is the same pay period) is the meet-the-teacher thingumy, so I suspect I'll be taking a fair amount of time off for those. If any is left over, I might try to slip out early next Friday. We'll see.

At least I won't be having to burn vacation time for it.