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More Shades of Gray, from Terry Gray, Rabid Citizen:

Bids For Airport Project

          There was a notice in the paper on Sunday, July 14, 2002 that bids were being accepted for the telecommunications work for an airport project.  “Cool”, I thought.  I’ll check it out.  My buddy went to pick up plans, which cost fifty bucks and called me.

           “This packet really doesn’t tell me anything,” he sighed on the phone.  “About all I can glean from it is that you have to tell them that the cost won’t exceed a certain price before you really know what they need done, you have to be a registered cable technician, bid proposals can’t exceed 30 pages, bidders must attend a mandatory meeting, and it’s basically pulling about 65 cables.  This packet must be 300 pages, a lot of it definitions, and no real meat.  It even defines pavement.”  We both laughed out of humor and out of a real appreciation of the government’s stupidity.

          What are these idiots trying to do?  Why 300 pages?  Why the meetings?  Who writes these “invitation for bids”?

          Look, you can’t bid on a job if you don’t know what needs to be done.  What is a registered cable technician?  I’ve been doing this kind of work for over 20 years and never heard of such a thing.  If it takes a person 30 pages to tell how he is going to pull 65 cables it’s going to take him 6 years to actually do the work.  Why can’t they tell you what they want done in the 300 pages for which you paid fifty dollars?

          I recently did a 44 cable job.  We did have a meeting that lasted long enough for the guy to give me a hand drawn map of where the cables needed to be, where the equipment was going, directions to the site, and a deposit check.  I ran the cables, fished them down the walls, terminated them on a patch panel, installed the jacks, tested them and was out of there in 2 days.  I was paid the balance a couple of days later.  WHAT IS THE BIG DEAL?  These guys aren’t playing with full decks.

Terry Gray

Rabid Citizen

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