Wednesday was, I’ll understate, quite a day. It wasn’t exactly “one of those days,” since I didn’t spill my coffee on myself or ride my bike into a tree or walk across fresh asphalt. But it was a draining, topsy-turvy day at work.
I knew the day was going to be intense, since my boss was out on vacation but we needed to submit a big proposal to a federal funder. I add the last bit because applying to a federal agency is pretty complicated, with small margins for error. I knew this at 8 a.m., when I sat down at my desk, ready to go. And whaddya know: the email message at the top of my inbox came from the program officer at the federal agency to which we were applying. I opened up the message and read, to my surprise, a polite but thorough takedown of our proposal – the one we were planning to submit by the end of the day.
Panic button! Calling around to others involved with the proposal, it became clear that the program officer was fundamentally misunderstanding our proposal, and – what’s more – apparently forgetting big chunks of her own grant program’s guidelines, which we had, of course, relied upon to shape our proposal. Dismaying, to say the least.
After spending the morning in discussions with stakeholders on campus and with my boss, via a shaky cell-phone link from somewhere in the Northwoods, we finally decided to go ahead and submit the proposal after modifying two key parts of the proposal in pretty important ways. I put my writing engine into overdrive and worked up two or three pretty decent pages of prose in about half an hour. This brought the proposal to the point of meeting some of the program officer’s points, though certainly not all of them.
Round about this point, I got the first of several calls from a faculty member who was preparing to submit another proposal to a different federal funder. Though the deadline was several days away, this prof was very eager to get his proposal done, so I wound up talking and emailing with him about the changes he still needed to make to his own materials. All this consumed a very valuable hour – though an hour that I could have burned the next day anyhow.
Finally returning to the first proposal, I worked with my boss’s assistant to make the finishing touches and submit, which finally happened in early afternoon. She headed home, having worked long hours on this proposal over the preceding week, and I turned back to some other tasks.
Whereupon I got a phone call from a friend who told me she’d just found out she has cancer. This is someone who’s had a rough twelve months, including more than her fair share of medical problems, so this was particularly hard to take. She has lots of supportive friends and family, including me, so she’s hopeful – but of course it’s still cancer.
On that note, I decided that Wednesday had done enough damage, so I went home too. Good riddance – and we’d better get that grant.