Get Fired Up
Slim Smokey is a guy who used to work for us. Actually govt employed. Now he's retired and working for a contractor, but his project is working for us. This contractor specializes at blowing smoke, really. They do good work, but like to confuse us as best they can. Before my job duties changed, I didn't really have much contact with this contractor and for some reason, others in our dept are content to let them just string us along with piles of data with no conclusion, when the conclusion is right in front of our face.

Slim knows what the Conclusion of the Matter is in this case. We have a very clear and distinct problem and there is one very clear and distinct solution, but it's not time for the contractor to tell us that.

But, if you get Slim a little fired up, get him talking about it in a debate type format, he'll just say flat out what needs to be done. And I, getting my first degree in rhetorical theory, hearing him spouting standard contractor smoke at the Director, popped out of my office and said presented a fragment of the truth that the contractor didn't want to reveal yet. Slim took my unrefined (I'm not a civil engineer) description, told me the points I was wrong about and then (big hurray) said in once sentence exactly what we needed to do, right in front of the director.

So, now, rather than spending $40,000,000 on two more years of analysis and a bloated project with that contractor, we'll spend around $5,000,000 fixing it either ourselves or with a different contractor we've used before and liked from Florida.

So, I just saved the city thirty-five million dollars.

And then they all went to lunch, and I got another cup of coffee.
- posted by Nick Postagulous @ 12:17 PM