This Was the Species that Was

D-3:05. Printing became an issue when the office filled up and everybody was printing stuff. Like every proposal shop I've ever worked at, there's no dedicated proposal printer, which is 17 different kinds of stupid all kludged together.

I finally had all my stuff printed; the costing guys finally said they were done and could live with their bill of materials and their pricing summary; I'm walking into the conference room where all our binders are set up (also no dedicated proposal production SPACE), and my boss says "There's a problem with the pricing; don't let anything go out yet."

And somehow this is my problem too.

Splatcom's pres, Frank Gymnast, is SO not happy with this prop. He's already called a meeting for a week from today to debrief on everything that went wrong and how to avoid it in future. I'll have a few choice words on the subject.

Meanwhile my mom called this a.m. and left her second messages in 24 hours, sounding pretty dire; but I already knew the news from eloquentwthrage's LJ: my grandmom is hospitalized and maybe gonna die. That's nice news to color the tail end of this horrific proposal process.

I have clocked 72.0 work hours in the last 7 days.

Update since Wednesday: the Cheeselord Tenebrae service went off well despite Fr. Kevin's homily. ( hiding in the tenebrae )

Thursday, my boss invites me to the "pipeline review" meeting where everyone involved in sales at Splatcom runs down the data on all potential opportunities. ( omg boring work talk )

Last night took a couple buses in a row from my office to St. John's Catholic Church in Falls Church to sing, as a ringer, for the Good Friday service there. ( back to church )

Metroed home, hung out awhile, and back out to the Green Lantern, which has managed to curry a respectable underwear night on Fridays as well as Saturdays. ( requisite smut content )

So here's what: I packed my enormous orange duffel bag with comforter (paraclete), light bankie, pillow, change of clothes, and toiletries bag, Wednesday morning, and took it to work with me, prepared to live there until Friday, napping on the floor of my office only as absolute needed, to get the current proposal done. Then late Wednesday afternoon Addendum 5 to the Request for Proposals (RFP) came out announcing a postponement of the due date till Tuesday, May 25. Wait, May? "It's a mistake," I insisted. "They mean March." Sure enough, minutes later another email from the client saying, "Ok, here's the REVISED Amendment 5," only there's no attachment. Two minutes after that, new email, with revised Amendment 5 really really attached, this time for sure. Tuesday, March 25. So whew.

I stopped at Omega on the way home and saw a bunch of nearly naked guys I know from way back, still shakin' they thangs on the bar. Gotta love underwear dancing... gotta because all the naked stuff went away. Got good and hosed, slept through my alarm (how 25 of me!), woke up at 8:13 and STILL made it to work for a 9:30 meeting. Needless to say, unwashed and somewhat slightly dazed. had a good, productive day: took the opportunity to help out two different VPs with two different responses to "requests for information" or "sources sought notices"—not proposals proper, pretty short, just some agency trying to figure out whether there's enough small business talent to release an acquisition as a small biz set-aside.

Left work at a decent hour Thursday, with my newly restored laptop (it had crapped out for the second time in 2 months... but Clem Braddington, our IT guy, helped diagnose it with his little magic bag of tricks and we got the OS restored without I had to shell out repair money; of course it restored to Vista and I had to overwrite XP a third time, and reinstall all my programs, but. It could have been worse. Anyway, I packed up my little Toshiba and the external harddrive I had brought in to do installs as I worked, and brought it all home in my enormous orange duffel bag... and realized I had left the laptop power cord at work. So I got online, reserved a Zipcar, headed back to Tysons, grabbed my cord, and came home. Ugh. Couldn't get to sleep to save my life so I just did more work on RFI responses, till 6ish, at which point I emailed various work folk and said "working from home today" and went to bed. Missed the 10 a.m. meeting by about 4 hours.

Last night was a rendezvous with avocado_tom and friends... including P, the brand new girlfriend (to be clear: the nomenclature's new as of two or three days ago) and somebody else that I was supposed to have remembered in detail but was still hazy on... a guy named Jerry that I knew in Delaware, and while I recognized his full name and his face when he walked in, I had the hardest time placing the context or thinking of one event or scrap of memory in which I could pinpoint him in timespace.

Tom and I still couldn't figure out whether we had ever met in person before, our common friends at UD notwithstanding. I spent some time looking at his face trying to imagine 12 or 14 years taken away... It wasn't clear. Didn't ring a bell. Yet his formulation ("Gary lusted after my roommate") pretty much says it. Actually, in retrospect, if back in Delaware he were anything near as cute as he is now, I'd remember him.

So anyway: there shows up at the Brickskeller a group of 10 (plus me); and of the 8 men present, what was extraordinary to me (though my Delaware experience with the crowd in which Tom and Jerry ran should have mitigated this) was how ... gay-like they were. "Metrosexual" doesn't even cut it. These guys aren't "queer-eyed"; they are queer, plain and simple—they just don't by nature or habit suck cock and suchlike, though I expect more than one of them wish at times they were so inclined. They are remarkably physically affectionate with each other—the moment we met Tom hugged me on the street when I held out my hand to shake; when we said goodbye he kissed me on the lips; his friend Bill introduced himself by feeling up my butt and made like he was trying to take me home at the end of the night, protesting his heterosexuality (with a plaintive "I've tried!") only when I went to French him; etc.

And of course, it was the Brickskeller, a patently fun place, the worst I can say about which is that the men's room is among the foulest in the city. I had a few terrific beers and Belgian ales and some pierogies that were deep-fried (eia! I expected pan-) but at least tasty. And I met (or maybe re-met) a batch of intelligent, articulate individuals whose conversation (and memory for scatological songs) was great fun. It was, in short, an interesting and very enjoyable time. This was some good company. (Thanks, Tom!)