In the
early 1990’s I was working for a small consulting company, Nutat, that had
taken over a contract I was working on at the National Library. I was absorbed
into new companies this way three or four times. After I finished at the
Library, I worked on a proposal for Health Canada to replace their central
computer systems. I focused on the hardware while a team of other consultants
worked on other aspects of the proposal. To give you an idea of the scale of
the project, our proposal, when completed, was about 500 pages long.
The company’s
technical writer, who was supposed to be overseeing the written package, was a
young woman who was very good at creating attractive-looking pamphlets, but not
much good at anything else. The company newsletter that she edited was filled
with recipes and cute cartoons—none of which had anything to do with the
company’s business. (I eventually got to take over her role and produced a company
newsletter that everyone was proud of.) I
have always held in contempt anyone who claims to be a writer or editor but
uses “words” like “alot” and reflexive pronouns where an objective one is
called for (eg., “Send the package to myself.”
It offends me that they occupy jobs that would better be handled by people with
basic high school level literacy.
Most
technical people are not very literate either. The parts of the proposal I read
that were written by others were filled with elementary spelling and grammatical
errors. I was concerned because it made the entire proposal look like something
thrown together by amateurs. The fellow who wrote the section on database
interfaces was particularly poor at being able to put together a coherent
sentence, but, he was also very stubborn and refused to correct any of the
errors I pointed out to him. His excuse was that he was using “standard
proposal terms.”
I pleaded
with the project manager to hire a professional writer/editor to oversee the
written part of the project and he kept reassuring me that he was going to hire
a professional. I just had to wait. So I watched with a sinking helpless
feeling as this monstrous book grew at the hands of these amateur writers.
My section of
the proposal was brief. After all, what can you say about hardware except to
list its specifications? So, I spent a lot of time going over other sections,
trying to improve the English. Then our technical writer proposed to the group
her design for the cover and general layout of the document. It was, though
attractive, seemingly unrelated to the subject at hand. It might serve as a
design and layout for a pot-boiler, but not for a serious technical document
meant to impress. The owner of the company shocked me when he told her, in
front of the group, that her proposal didn’t give him a “hard-on.” He was
right, but I had never heard such language from senior managers. (I’ve heard
lots worse since.)
A week
before our presentation to the clients, on a Monday, I again expressed my
concern about the amateurish look of the proposal to the project manager. Once
again he said that he was bringing in a talented writer to fix it up. I didn’t
see how that could be accomplished in the time we had remaining. The next day,
the Tuesday, we were informed that the project manager had left the company and
someone else was taking over the position. As I had read most of the proposal I
was appointed to bring him up to speed. Then, two days later, on the Thursday,
we were informed that he had left the
company and was being replaced. I had Friday and the weekend to get the new guy
up to date. What I had never understood then, or since, was that the company
owner must have known before that Monday that he was going to show two senior
people the door. So, why on earth did he appoint someone to head the project that
he knew he was going to fire two days later?
In any case…
I came into
work on the Saturday to go over the proposal with the third project head. He
was busy scribbling notes—and sweating. Two days before he had known nothing
about the project as he had been in the field working for another client. The
fellow we had appointed to make the actual presentation was an older, very experienced,
gentleman who seemed at ease in his role as we held walk-throughs and rehearsals.
The Monday
came. A group of about eight of us arrived at the client’s site and set up in a
large board room. I sat beside the project head as he was bound to be asked
questions and, it was hoped, I’d be able to whisper a few hints to him so that
he wouldn’t make a complete fool of himself. About a dozen people represented
the client. We sat facing each other across a circular table. And our presenter
began to talk….
It was a
total disaster. Though he had seemed comfortable in rehearsal, he now froze,
stammered, and kept backtracking and repeating himself, sometimes getting lost
in mid-sentence. The client representatives sat quietly and, when he was done,
began peppering our team, especially the project manager I was sitting beside,
with questions. The project manager, for his part, got a panicky look whenever
he was asked a question, glanced at the piles of paper on his lap that
contained his notes and then looked to me. I’d whisper as much of an answer as
I could. He answers to the client were as brief and uninformative as I could
hardly impart that much information in a whispered sentence or two.
As we left
the building we were passed by a team from a large well-known company going the
other way. I could tell by their appearance that they were relaxed and old
hands at this. They were used to winning contracts, and this one was no
exception.
Our team
repaired to a bar near the office where our presenter agonized over his
performance. “I cost us a million dollars,” he lamented. Everyone tried to
reassure him, all the while knowing that he was right. On the other hand I knew
that once the client started reading the document we had submitted with our
proposal that they would conclude that we were a bunch of idiots. It is so sad
to see a company going down, especially when you are working for it. That
contract had been a desperate manoeuvre on the owner’s part to save what was
left of his company (at its peak he had employed about 200 people; at this time
we were down to about 75 and still shrinking.) Still, I got out of the
consulting side and joined the application development team as a programmer, as
that had the best chance of survival. Sure enough, in a month or two, the
company was split in half with the consulting team being sold off and the small
application team, me included, moving to a new, smaller, location.
