Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2003 14:50:03 -0400
From: Steve Smith <sgs at aginc.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: If You Want to Sell Cookies ...
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

Strong, Lee wrote:
> 	Well, I agree with Steve that this degree of specificity is so silly
> that it becomes funny.  However, having been on the writing end of this
> process, I know that it's often necessary because somebody will try to sell
> you jalapeno broccoli cookies when what you wanted were sugar cookies.  When
> you reject the broccoli cookies, the salesbeing will sue you claiming that
> you didn't specify sugar rather than broccoli in your original request.  So
> you wind up specifying yellow versus tan because the alternative is the
> taxpayers wasting even more green in the long run.

Yup.  Problem is the way the bid process works.  You can't throw out a
bid if it meets all the specifications -- so you have to specify that
"chocolate chip cookies" have chocolate chips and not, say, onions.
Otherwise, you'd have to go with the cheaper ones.  And, of course, you
can't specify a specific brand without doing sole-source things.  You
can't even say "an Oreo(tm) - type cookie".

I used to have a copy of the MIL-SPEC for condoms lying around.  It was
even stranger than the cookie spec.

--
Steve Smith                                           sgs at aginc.net
Agincourt Computing                            http://www.aginc.net
"Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense."