Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Yoda Never Met Moldovan Businessmen

When I first start writing my grant I did not take many things into account.


Number 1: as railed against frequently, Claudia's personal sheistiness.

Number 2: my partners may not have gotten exact prices on the things they were in charge of pricing.

Number 3: that prices fluctuate THAT MUCH

Number 4: the furniture literally had to be built, it did not come in Ikea-like packets as advertised.

Number 5: not pre talking to the cabinet maker at length about the project and who his REAL liasons were (ie. Don't listen to Claudia)

Number 6: that assembly on site was not included in the bargained price

Number 7: that constructors would not tell me about vacations to Ukraine

Number 8: that so much paperwork went into writing a receipt

Number 9: that no amount of fact checking and repeating of one's self would make no difference

Number 10: It takes 2 months to write a receipt.


Seriously, half of these things are extremely time heavy, and time is one of several things I am dangerously short of in the first week of August.


I took the latest possible (official) COS date for various reasons, but the most ready and quantifiable one was this freaking grant. I thought, surely, we would get it all done in June, and then all of July we'd settle into the new room, and in August I'd just pack my shit and leave.


No such logical luck at all. Despite running over it and handing out schedules.


Sympathy from other volunteers consists of “that's why I didn't do a grant,” and “wow, I'm glad I didn't do a grant,” and “yea, my grant was rough too.”


Sympathy from Carolina, my grant manager at PC says “give them pressure.”


It's hard to give the #1 receipt writer pressure when he has adieosed to Kiev. He said he'd be back tonight though... Pressure tomorrow? Well, let's just hope he comes home.


The dictionaries were so nice and done in less than 20 minutes. According to my religious prophet, Yoda, size matters not, thus it should be just as easy to write a receipt for a classroom full of furniture as it is for a stack of dictionaries.

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