Your Government Dollars At Work

October 19th, 2002 Posted in 2002

For those who don’t know, I’m a proposal writer for a living. This means that, on behalf of my company, I answer requests for proposals from all manner of companies.

Let me explain this: If a company wants product x, say, rather than just go out and buy it, they’ll put the request on the the market, define exactly what they need, and let the companies come to THEM with proposals for fulfilling their requirement. Then they can sit at their leisure and pick through the documents for the best one. I write proposal responses for my company, trying to get companies to choose us to provide the services they’ve requested.

So I’m responding to a government request today for a database developer in Ottawa. Government documents are just fucking torture, by the way, for the anal way they make you answer everything. They set in specifications for the fonts and margins you have to use, for God’s sake. And everything’s graded. If they want, say, experience with tugging at your little sizzler, 2 years experience gets 5 points, 4 years gets 10, and 8 and over gets 15, for example.

Anyway, as I’m going through the latest request for proposal, I notice this hilarious requirement:

Experience within a Microsoft 2000 sever platform environment.
2 to 4 yrs experience: 4 points
4 to 6 yrs experience: 8 points
6 yrs and over experience: 16 points

Now… come fucking on. The goal is to get the maximum number of points, of course, so the candidate I’m keying in the responses for has gone for the max. So he’s basically said, for every job he’s ever had, that he has experience with Microsoft 2000.

So what’s sillier: the government asking for 6 years and over of experience in Microsoft 2000? Or a programmer confidently responding that he’s been using it as far back as 1994?