Yesterday morning, after I'd posted my journal entry but before I'd even logged into irc (and that's a very slim window of time, indeed) one of the managers wandered into my office.

(This is the guy who used to be the QA manager before me, but now he's what's called an Operations Manager, which means he does all the nasty tedious work that no one else wants to do, like working the budgets and writing proposals and that sort of thing.)

And he said, "Got a minute?"

I swear, I'm never letting him into my office before noon again.

See, we're putting together a proposal for a contract. Nothing exciting; we do this all the time. I'm not giving any details here; I suspect that's all company proprietary information, and I could be fired for making it public. And anyway, it wouldn't interest anyone. But that we're putting together a proposal to bid on a contract, that's not news.

Anyway, the other manager who'd been going to help him write up the proposal was out of town all last week because one of his projects went haywire. And he's out of town for the last half of this week, too. And though he's the kind of guy who works twelve-hour days without complaint... He just couldn't do it. No time left in his day to put this all together.

And I'm... not very busy right now. And I'm a manager, which means I'm allowed to see all the financial garbage. And I can write, which is kind of unusual for an ex-techie.

So I've been tapped to help put together the proposal. Specifically, I've been put in charge of putting together a specific portion of the proposal, which is to say the "corporate experience and past performance" portion, wherein I have to explain how some of our prior work applies to what this contract is looking for.

Oh, and my first deadline? Is Wednesday (today) at noon, about twenty-eight hours after being told I was going to do this work.

There are very specific formats to use for this stuff, and very specific steps. Today's deadline, for example, is to turn in what are basically outlines. Tomorrow, I'll be in a meeting for the entire flipping afternoon to go over the outlines, and then I've got until next Tuesday to produce a rough draft. (My piece of this thing is just about 30 pages long.)

I haven't had to turn in outlines and rough drafts since the 10th grade. And I haven't had to write 30 pages in four days since I was in college.

So I worked a couple of hours late last night. And I'm a little intimidated by this.

But I sent my draft outlines to our coordinator last night for comments, and this morning she'd already written back, and she only had about three suggestions, all of which were very minor.

This morning's task is to dig up the old contracts, so I can quote them chapter and verse to prove that they're similar to the new one.

At least I'm not bored, I guess...

--Liz