Not much to report either way

So, on the one hand, I got an e-mail this morning from my contracting manager, with a subject line of "Contract Status". You might think this would be cause for either panic or celebration, but the gist of the e-mail was in fact admitting that the status of our contract remains unknown. It also acknowledged that this is because the government is behind schedule on making a final decision, and there wasn't much to be done about that except for my manager to continue pestering the government supervisor, who in turn can't do much except pester her own bosses and various other decision-makers above her in the hierarchy until something shakes loose. My manager did go out on a limb and say that he's "positive" in an unofficial, opinion-based way, based on certain "indicators" he is privy to. He also said that numerous people on our team had been hitting him up for more info, and reiterated that (1) as soon as there is anything to know, he will be in the loop and (2) he will also keep all of us in the loop. One of the things I do genuinely like about my contracting boss is that he doesn't play games or make anyone guess what he's thinking, and in fact the aforementioned reiteration is the closest anyone would ever have to come to needing to read between the lines with him. (The reading, for the slow kids in the back, is "Shut up and stop asking me, I'm not sitting on new info just for funsies.")

I feel like I've blogged about this before, but I think I actually haven't; I've just been talking about it with my wife and corresponding with a couple of other curious parties who've asked. Basically, the bridge contract is over in a little more than four weeks, which means there is not really enough time to do a proper hand-off transition if we lost the contract and some other team was coming in. Pretty soon we're going to be inside the window of time where we get auto-notified about our badges and other credentials expiring, because those are tied to the bridge contract, although there's nothing we can do about that until we have a new contract officially in place. No doubt what is going to happen is that the new contract will be finalized in a couple of weeks, and the onus will be on my team to do a mad scramble of completing and filing new paperwork and making appointments at the building pass office and whatnot. So it goes.

Meanwhile, on the other hand, my botched-up interview from this past Friday has been rescheduled for early tomorrow morning. I don't exactly have the warm fuzzies about this lead, but I'm going to see it through, if only because I can always use some practice sharpening my self-selling skills. If it turns out to be a really great opportunity and they make me a hard-to-resist offer, obviously that would be fantastic. But I'm not pinning my hopes on that unlikely scenario. Right now I'm just trying to figure out if I can get through the interview, get back to my regular gig before too much of the morning has elapsed and without drawing too much attention to myself from my co-workers, and then either stay late or otherwise make up the time throughout this pay period so I don't go any deeper in the PTO hole. I think I can, but as always if things go astoundingly pear-shaped I will be sure to file my post-fact escapades here.