General Jackassery

Well, I have to say that I’ve been a bit on the stressed side the last two days. I’ve been working on a project for one of the PM’s downstairs and it requires that I take a proposal from a contractor and a estimate from the government and compare them to determine whether or not the contractor’s price is fair and reasonable. I believe that the contractor’s proposal is fair. The only problem is that the idiot who originally did the estimate for the government left some key things out. The two prices were only 2.5% apart, but that’s a lot on a project of this size. However, if he had included a couple of things that the Scope of Work requires we would have been right on the money. Now, factor that in with the fact that the two proposals are for 100% of the project. Then the contractor comes back with another proposal that encompasses about 30% of the actual work and I have to redo the numbers for the Government estimate and determine whether or not the contractor is presenting a fair price. There’s one problem with that, in construction there are a LOT of fixed costs. No matter how much you do you’re going to have to pay the same price for certain things. That in mind, 30% of the work actually costs 50% of the price if you did it all at once. In other words, if you did all of the work at one time it might cost you 1 million dollars. However, if you were to cut back and only do 30% of the work it’s still going to cost you half a million. Sucks, huh? The problem is we don’t have the time (due to weather limitations of the project) or the money to award the whole thing. So, in the long run it will cost more. So it’s my job to put the numbers together that would allow the PM to award a 4 million dollar project. NO STRESS at all!

On a happier note, Sarah and I got to go on a real date last night! I picked her up at her place, we went to dinner at Luciano (mmmmm, Italian!), and then went to Spiderman 2. I wish we’d seen Shrek 2 and so did she, but it was a nice evening and I’m glad we finally got to do what couples do.

As a side, all the animals are doing well!

That’s all for now!