silly approvals and catholics [separate topics]
I battled the pricing approval geniuses at work today.
To backtrack a tad… Friday’s big meeting to get me some good pricing for a customer to win a huge deal was not what I expected – I went in expecting either a yes or a no. I got a maybe. Annoying. Basically, everyone on the forum was supportive and thought it was a good deal and that we needed to get moving on it. Problem was, no one there had the delegation to say yes. It was quite a unique opportunity and there weren’t really any precedents, so perhaps they were all just a bit scared. It just needed someone to take a step out and go, “yeah, let’s just do it.” Frustrating somewhat. So that left me with an even shorter deadline and with different people to talk to.
I spoke to the customer and found out that I kinda had a little bit more time, but time was still was very, very short. So this morning I filled in some forms, sent them through to some pricing guys who were going to help me get what I wanted. And we back-and-forthed a bit during the day when we got rejected, trying to find more info and a way to work things from a different angle to get what we wanted, without straight-out lying to get what we wanted. There may have been slight exaggerations about some things…
But the good thing is that as of tonight, I’m still not out of the game – the customer has given me til the end of tomorrow, and I’ve told the pricing guys that deadline and I didn’t hear from them in the last couple of hours… which may be positive and mean that it’s just gone somewhere to get sign-off now that it looks like it could make our company some money. (And by that I mean, “look the way they want it to look.”)
Oh it’s so fun to work for such a huge organisation with so many different approvals that are needed, and you don’t know who to get it from til you’ve consulted your handbook and found out which astrological period we’re in, and whether or not the planets are all aligned…
edit: got the approvals today! That’s part 1 done. Now I just have to sit back and wait for the Government to accept my customer’s proposal and everyone will be happy. It’s gonna be a nervous two weeks.
I began listening to a talk on the differences between Catholicism and Protestant beliefs on the way home from Debbie’s tonight. Deano preached it a couple of months ago while I was at Kedron, and so I missed it. But I got myself a copy on Sunday and thought it would be interesting to listen to… and it has been thus far. But my drive home is only a bit over half an hour, and apparently I’m only about halfway through the talk – perhaps I’m glad I’m listening to it in the car now and not on that Sunday evening ;) hehe.
Looking forward to hearing the rest of it though. Perhaps I will blog some thoughts about it later.