Pending

I am sitting on pins and needles as I wait to hear about proposals. Ok, so I only have one that I am actually waiting to hear on. The other two haven’t even been submitted yet. Gah. After hearing yesterday that one of my projects was cut I made a phone call and got some face time with one of the managers that listens (or not) to your great ideas, tells you how wonderful you are (or not), and then hands you a pile of cash (or not).

I went to him with three decent, albeit farfetched, ideas. One had already been formulated into a large proposal this spring, but difficulties were encountered in filing it and the company backed down on sending it out due to internal issues. The second was just a “I did some work on this for a couple months, sound interesting?” idea. The last was my farfetched surface analysis proposal that I submitted as a white paper earlier this year and yielded the statement “good idea” from the reviewers.

I had expected the middle one would be of interest since it was directly in line with one of the section calls. It was poo poo’d. The third was the one I was hopeful about but they always ask me “what are the limits of detection” and “how is this better than what we already have”. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t know, truly I don’t. But it is a great idea!! Ok, so maybe it is a good idea.

It was the first idea that stood out to the manager. The one that falls directly under the little line that says “ideas supporting XXX will not be accepted for this call”. I knew it supported this agency, that is who the proposal was supposed to go out to a few months ago. I more was doing my part in exercising this as one of my capabilities and putting word out there. The manager told me to send it off to the XXX manager, if he wants to push it, they will support it. Preliminary word back is that there is an interest and it has been deemed potential high impact. Which is what you want to see written on any proposal review.

Cross your fingers for me, send me good vibes. The LAST thing I want to do is go searching for projects to start working on as of October 1.