SAFE LANDING: In the world of criminal justice bureaucracy, you’ve got to put up with some shrewd and aggressive people. My latest little encounter regarded a federal grant opportunity that we had hardly an icicle’s chance in hell of getting. Still, one of the shrewd higher-ups (a trial attorney by trade) decided that we had to go for it, mostly to impress the big boss (the County Prosecutor). And since I’m the “grants guy”, that meant that I’d have to catch the hot potato here. I’d be the guy to take the blame if we didn’t submit the application, or catch hell if we submitted something really junky, despite the fact that our proposal clearly wasn’t what the feds were looking for. The blame-game will start once we got the rejection notice.

OK, so I played the game. The grant was due yesterday (Friday), via GRANTS.GOV (all federal grants are now submitted electronically). On Thursday evening, I got a few pages of materials from someone who had no idea what a grant application looked like, so on Friday I had to massage that fluff into something that at least looked like a decent submission. The thing that annoyed me about it was that I was working at the same time on another federal grant application, one that we do in fact have a shot at (due Monday). Oh well, that’s life. Nothing at all happens, or everything happens at once.

I had the fluff lady, who was supposed to have prepared the application, come in on Friday despite her having the day off. Well hey, this grant was her boss’s idea, so she needed to bear some of the brunt too. I gave her the federal checklist and told her what we needed. She was good-natured enough about it. Still, had she bothered to look at the grant punchlist a week ago, she might had been able to have stayed home. But some people, despite being smart (she’s another trial attorney), just don’t know how to follow instructions.

Anyway, by 5 PM on Friday, we at least had enough stuff to say that we addressed every point in the proposal request; not very well, but at least there were no obvious omissions. Our proposal was still way off-base and will clearly be rejected, given the extreme competition for federal grants these days. But at least I had my own butt covered. Another day, another week, another grant, another bureaucratic maneuver to escape the line of fire.

By 5:30 PM I had an e-mail confirmation from GRANTS.GOV that our application had been received. It was an intense day of work for me, but it was finally time to go home. Just before I locked up my desk and grabbed my bag, I fired up the browser for a quick look at the news. The headline on nytimes.com was appropriate: Space Shuttle Lands Safely. Yep. As I marched down the stairway towards the door, I reflected on it: a safe landing in California for the Shuttle, a safe bureaucratic landing in Newark for me. The Shuttle never fulfilled its promise, and my own life went the same route. But it was Friday evening, and we were both on the ground safely after a busy week. So, it was time for a beer, not for a tear of regret.