Wednesday, January 15, 2003
And let me tell you, you haven't truly lived until you've helped prepare a grant proposal for the National Science Foundation.
Take an itemized 1040 form, a legal document and a scientific manuscript, roll them into one, add over 100 pages of regulations on submitting the proposal - prepared by our government, of course - and you have a recipe for utter ridiculous chaos. To protect the innocent, we won't mention any names.
The rules for submitting a proposal like this are very straightforward - the content must be no longer that 15 pages, margins must be precisely 2.5cm all around the page, the font must be sans serif 11-point, and there must be no more that 15 characters per horizontal linear inch of text. Sound simple? Not on your life, when you have a 100-page document on the NSF's website describing in painful detail how the document must be prepared. For example, what if your PDF software shrinks the page just a teensy little bit out of whack?
No dice. These submission requirements are the nerd equivalent of the rock-star rider: no brown M&M's in the dressing room bowl.
I've been working on this project for about a month now, and today is the absolute deadline to submit the proposals to the NSF. Today, January 15th at 5:00pm Eastern time is the cutoff. It's now 3:42pm Central time - 4:42pm in Washington DC - and we just submitted it with 18 minutes to spare. Did I mention that millions of dollars of international research money is riding on the outcome of this proposal? No, no pressure here.
Finito. I need a cup of coffee and a whack on the head.
