Hurry Up and Wait
I’m still here, grinding away… wondering when I’ll get around to some more edits for the site. Work has hit a “crunch time” and it’s not leaving me with much room for many other activities.
I first heard the motto “hurry up and wait” in the Army. From the moment the first alert is sounded, we’d have everything packed, every vehicle rigged for heavy-drop, and every soldier fully ‘chuted up in well under 6 hours… then we’d wait for sometimes 18 more hours on the side of the runway for our ride.  Sometimes, after all that, they’d just send us home. Hurry up n wait. Bust your hump now, then have nothing to do until the next fire drill starts.
Nothing much changes in the civilian side of things, it seems.
Some people can be critical about the expense of government contractors compared to more commercial endeavours. Heck, I’ve bitched about that enough. Truth is, every government agency I’ve encountered is a bear to work with… late in releasing funds, giving approval, or making decisions… even later in identifying specs or “critical requirements”… and they’re very persuasive in getting their way when you try to argue that the information’s well past a critical deadline. You can be 3/4 the way through the project, after countless client reviews, and someone will suddenly say something that nullifies all of your work. The end result- for what we have to work with, the taxpayer’s probably getting a bargain.
That’s where I’m at right now- a grossly-late project suddenly gets the go-ahead with a “mission-critical” emergency call to get it started. It enters the line with three other similarly-urgent similarly-late taskings… none of which were originally scheduled for this time.
It doesn’t leave much time for much else. Until the next big “wait,” which history has shown can come as suddenly and as unexpectedly as the “hurry up.”
March 1st, 2007 at 2:29 am
Overall, private industry tends — tends — to be more efficient in time- and resource-management than government because it has to be in order to compete and survive. There’s often no accountability or oversight when it comes to government projects.
There was a (fairly) recent example of a massive government building complex that lost months of time and (even more importantly) tens of millions of dollars because it was placed in the wrong area. So they had to demolish what they’d done and start over. But because of the lack of accountability, no one was punished, and it happened because there was no oversight.
Which has little to do with your post, but it came to mind as I read it.
April 10th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Are you done yet?