Things are just generally blah with me right now.

Work is frustrating because we’ve got two customers, one with each of the major American aerospace BigCos, but on both we have the same end customer in the same NASA project office. That project office likes to talk to directly to us, which neither customer really likes but we can’t help. I understand their frustration; I’ve been a middle-man on contracts before and have had my customer go to my vendor and totally side-step me. It’s a frustrating place to be.

Our contractual situation doesn’t help; on one contract, we’ve been shifted from a contract we’d had for years to a new contract that’s controlled far more tightly [which is generally a good thing] but is far less flexible [which is generally a bad thing in a rapid-response environment like we're in on that one right now]. We really are working towards Return to Flight in earnest now, and people need their stuff RIGHT NOW, DAMMIT! [Some of you are undoubtedly thinking of the old adage, "A failure to plan on your part does not necessitate a need to panic on mine." However, our Rapid Response capability is a core competency.]

[It's also sad when I use the term "core competency" without any sarcasm or thought. I'm a drone trainee, man.]

The other contract isn’t any more fun; parts of it are time-and-material, parts are cost-plus-incentive-fee, and parts are firm-fixed price. With every job, you have to stop and take a moment to think, “Now, is $project T&M, CPIF, or FFP?” That affects how we go about working stuff. We’ve had a couple FFP projects go rapidly out-of-scope in the last week, and honestly … we took these as FFP in an effort to help our customer control costs, and we knew it was a bad thing when we did it. Now we get to expend effort making estimates on what the impacts are going to be … we can’t do a “variance at completion”—one of my favorite terms in contract, cost, and schedule, mind you!—but rather are stuck with the fun of taking time to say, “This is what it should cost,” and then hope that we don’t make the right estimates so we don’t lose our shirts.

As a result of all this insanity and its general unresolved nature, it sticks in my craw and occupies some part of my mental process at all times, which, of course, means that you’re continually processing something that you can’t solve. Not very GTD of me, now is it?

All that leads to general malaise, which when coupled with the stress that’s always attendant with holidays with my family plus the radically shorter days … yeah, I feel like a sack of crap.

But I’m still kickin’.