What goes around ...

Plenty of people have no idea what I do with my day each day. When I say I'm the grantwriter, the questions invariably is: "well, how much money have you brought in?"

The answer is over 200K this fiscal (and over a million if you count all of it), but that's neither here nor there. That's my job, that is what I do. I write, I edit, I rewrite, I re-edit, I send out for final approval/edits and move on. There is only so much time one can write and rewrite before you have nothing more to say/to add.

As part of my job, I write the grants themselves. Some are easier than others and I have typically allowed *some* editing by people, particularly if I think they know how to edit. Yesterday I had a grant due. Just a little letter of intent, no big deal for any practical purposes, just a normal grant. The grant was for the whole case manager thing which I've described earlier -- it wasn't the most warm/fuzzy grant I've ever written and it probably needed to be.

I had given the final draft to the supervisor in charge of the program. Let's call her Jane. Jane, of course, is a very busy woman. Lots of employees and at this time of year she is busy, busy, busy. I knew this, so what I did for the grant was recycle some language we had used for an earlier letter of intent. In fact, all I did for one particular paragraph was cut and paste. No editing.

Today I get a rather shitty email from Jane telling me she wanted more time to review the proposal and included a copy of her comments.

For a few minutes I was pissed off. I had used what I had written before and what she had edited. I didn't take liberties with the document, just recycled.

Then after a trip downstairs for my daily 32 oz icewater in the morning (yes, pretty much cut out all caffeine), I go back to my office, print off her comments and then print off the earlier copy of the grant letter of intent that I had cut and pasted from into the new document. Mind you, she had edited the earlier edition and had approved it.

The very same paragraph she labeled needs rewritten was the one she had written before. After discovering this little bit of information, I kindly wrote her back and told her there was no need for someone to rewrite the letter of intent, it was gone but that if we were invited to participate in the grant application stage, we would take time to write and rewrite. I then attached a copy of the new grant application and moved on with my day, no longer feeling like some dumbass that could not write.

CCM said it would have been hard for her not to rub it in Jane's face. My response was this: I will await my opportunity to bring this up when she mentions just how poorly written that particular paragraph was in a later meeting. Then I will gladly bring out both copies and say something along the lines of: "well, I felt that since you had written this paragraph that you were comfortable with its' contents."

I'm not vindictive but I will stand my ground. What goes around ... comes around.

I am so hoping she brings this up later. ;)