Not more to do!

Work's gone a bit bonkers.

The main problem is actually that we lack staff - several important people are away on contract and rather than ease back on bidding stuff we've been ploughing ahead. This has resulted in us having several bids to get out in a very short period of time.

Add in to that it's Easter and you can see how it's gotten silly.

One of the most annoying things about bidding is that people often give you utterly ridiculous timescales. Or rather, they give you utterly ridiculous timescales, but give themselves way more time than they need.

Basically, we often get bids that pay no regard to things like holidays (such as Christmas and Easter). It's like they're fully expecting you to work your arse off over those holidays.

Also, they'll give you horribly short deadlines - a couple of weeks to do an entire ITT, which is no mean feat I can tell you.

But then they'll give themselves months to assess those ITTs. Plus, they'll pay absolutely no regard to the deadlines they set themselves, meaning they'll be late. But you can't be late - if you're late, then you're out on your ear.

The worst ones are when they're late and in order to claw back the time they maintain your deadlines. "Oh, we were a month late, but we're not extending your deadline. That's alright isn't it?"

It's like these people don't live in the real world.

There was one a while back where they were asking for a huge piece of work to be done. It was literally man-months of effort that would be required to do it.

Now my personal dodgyness radar was already flagged by the really tight timescales they'd given for the work, but we proceeded with the initial phase anyway. When we got the final requirement they'd given an indication of budget of... £5,000.

That's nothing - we could easily spend that in a week - and it was a massive underestimate of the task they were asking for.

It'd be funny if it wasn't so annoying.