Standard Time

I jokingly said that nothing ever changes at work, but that’s a joke that has countless grains of truth within it. Right now it seems especially true because, while the Halloween Countdown was going on, the 15th of October quietly came and went in the background, unremarked upon by me, and my employer submitted their official proposal for re-competing on the contract to do the work that we do. This was the new deadline after all the old deadlines slipped, and amazingly enough this one seems to have stuck, which means the Army now has 30 days to review all the bids and select who will be awarded the contract. The deadline, of course, may once again be blown (it does in fact seem far more likely that the deadlines where the ball is in the DoD’s court and they have to do something would be kicked down the road, as opposed to the ones where the DoD simply has to deem themselves ready to receive the ball incoming from someone else’s court, to torture a sports analogy) but whether it is or not, for the next couple weeks until at least the 15th of November, there’s naught all to do but wait and see what happens.

I did bump into my boss (government, not contracting) this morning in the elevator, and she conversationally groused to me about how for the next few days she would be up to her eyeballs in her portion of the contract bid review process. Which … seems a little bit inappropriate? To discuss with me, I mean, a lowly contractor very much affected by the outcome. There’s a part of me that wonders if maybe it doesn’t strike my boss as too cavalier to speak offhandedly about reviewing bids because she and I both know my employer is going to win in the end, or at least she knows and assumes I should also know. I’d like for that to be true, I really would, because I’d rather have my job be stable and my future of sticking with said job to be a choice of my own free will.

But maybe it’s a simple matter of the ever-present double standard between civilian government employees and contractors, where they take their job security for granted and we are supposed to suck up the easy-come-easy-go-and-what-have-you-done-for-me-lately nature of our gigs as the price of doing business. In that case, it doesn’t matter if I think it’s weird to talk about the thread my steady paycheck is hanging by in the context of it being one more annoying to-do task for my boss, because I’m just an interchangeable expense category in the bottom line. Who knows.

Anyway, these are the fun thoughts that float through my head as another workweek begins at the start of a new month. You’re welcome.