11 March 2010
Hint of Spring
(Tidal Basin from the 14th Street Bridge)
The blood is quickening in Washington, and the last of the adamant piles of compacted snow are yielding to the rising temperatures. The lot in Big Pink is wet with the melt, and crunchy with the sand put down to enable traction in the aftermath of the great blizzards.
It was as savage as anything I have seen in this southern town, but life rises inexorably with the tilting of the planet against the sun. The Cherry Blossom Festival is in two weeks, and it is coming, ready or not.
Things have accelerated here, business-wise, since the Government appears to have woken from a long slumber with a start. There is money being dangled on all sides and the Vendor community is hungry.
It is all hot-house stuff and I will not bother you with the details. I have had a couple epiphanies about the whole business of being in, and then doing business with, our Government. My conclusion is simple:
This crap is only interesting to the people who are doing it, and so complicated that it baffles and bores everyone else.
Still, it is what it is. We will get to things more interesting presently.
I was stunned yesterday to find that Spring appeared to have sprung early at Bolling Air Force Base. The ice was melting there, too, almost all gone, and there was a primo parking place into which to navigate the vast bulk of the Bluesmobile. A parking place like that is a once-a-quarter experience. With the time saved by not having to hike for the Commissary lot a mile away from the building, we were able to have lunch in the Agency cafeteria instead of having to run breathless to the meeting.
All the Vendors popped out like daffodils to attend the much-anticipated Technical Briefing on the big contract offering. I’ll spare you the details, but it is for hundreds of people and a lot of money.
With the stakes as high as they are, you can imagine the somewhat surreal atmosphere in the room. Everyone, Government and Contractor alike, attempted to adopt a routine attitude toward a mission requirement that the Government cannot afford to screw up. The current contracts are ending, there are operational matters that must be addressed, and lives are on the line.
Everyone minded their roles with precision. There will be no whiff of favoritism in the selection of the Contractor for the effort. The big screen of the VTC at the front of the room showed a battalion of briefers who read precisely from their scripts, word for word exactly what had been disseminated in the read-ahead packages. It was excruciating.
When the heavily scripted presentation came to an end, there was the usual opportunity for questions. There were none, which considering the magnitude of the effort was pretty amazing. The final solicitation is not yet completed, and consequently, we do not have the critical “L” and “M” sections of the solicitation. That is where the devil-in-the-details issues lie, but that was not the point.
There is normally a rough-and-tumble aspect to the question period, since we have done dozens of these presentations and we all have little stock questions to ask pointedly. That was not the case today. The Vendors sat still as stones around the table, not wanting to reveal any strategy.
This clearly unnerved the Government, and the briefers went off script for a while to talk about the difficulties of the mission and the complexity of the task.
Finally they ran out of things to talk about, and still the Vendors sat mute, faces blank, cards held closely to their vests..
The Government finally shrugged and signed off the video-teleconference, thanked us all for our attendance, and dismissed us.
We walked out, taking notes on who was walking with whom. When we emerged from the severe façade of the Agency’s new building, it had turned a little cloudy, but the temperature was hovering right at 60 degrees. It might be only a hint of Spring, but I threw my suit jacket in the back seat of the police cruiser and rolled up my sleeves for the drive back across the river.
For the first time in months, it really felt good to be alive. There is an awful lot of work to be done about all this, but I was hoping the primo parking place was an omen of sorts.
I looked at the still-bare branches of the cherry trees around the Tidal Basin on the approach ramp to Virginia. I could not see if there were any buds worth noting yet on the delicate cherry trees that rim the shore. I sighed as I swerved onto the buckled concrete of the 14th Street Bridge.
I should have stopped somewhere in the District and bought a lottery ticket on the way home.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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