I got a call from a headhunter who asked me if I’d be interested in a contract down in San Diego. He gave me enough details to make me think it was Cadovra, though, of course, they usually try to keep you from guessing which company is involved until they’re ready to call you in for an interview. But he put me on to another firm that was trying to strike a deal to go in there as consultants and straighten Cadovra out.
I’d been permanent at Cadovra myself, before I went out contracting, so I knew quite a bit about them. That was how I was able to figure out it was them from the details the headhunter gave me. Naturally, once they found out that I knew where the bodies were buried, the consulting firm was happy to talk to me. Normally, the headhunters serve as middlemen between the prospective customer and the candidate. They set up the interviews, get feedback, check references, and so forth, and in payment, they get a commission if you actually get hired.
This time, I made some sort of reference to the headhunter in a phone conversation with my contact at the consulting firm, a guy named Owen. “Oh,” the guy said, “Let’s not say anything more to him about this, OK?” In other words, they were going to screw the headhunter out of his commission. Not a good sign. If they’re going to screw one guy, they’re going to screw someone else. Ask me how I know.
Anyhow, it turned out that Cadovra wanted a consulting firm to come in and fix a long list of IS problems for a flat fee. They outlined all the problems in the RFP, and the bidders were supposed to estimate how long it would take to fix them and bid on the overall job accordingly. Naturally, since I’d worked there, I knew their environment better than anyone, and it was pretty easy to come up with solid estimates on how long it would take and how many people would be needed.
“’Are you sure?’ Owen asked me when I e-mailed him the draft. “This estimate seems awfully low.”
“Actually, there’s a lot of wiggle room in it,” I said. “A lot of these things can be solved just by changing a system parameter here or there. It takes maybe 30 seconds. You can prep for all of them with the same bunch of meetings, phone calls, and memos. But I’ve allowed one day in the schedule for each of the changes, when all together they’ll just take minutes to do.”
“Well,” Owen said, “that’s great – I guess. But it means we’re going to be a lot lower than the next higher bid.’”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“We’ll be leaving money on the counter. If we’re just a little bit lower, we still get the contract, but we make more money.” What he meant, of course, was that he made more money, or he and his partners. I’d be paid the same hourly rate to do the same stuff I’d agreed to do in the first place. “I’m going to go over this and add hours,” he went on. “I have an idea what the other bidders are going to do, and I’m going to bring this up so it’s just a little below what I think they’re going to bid.”
That wasn’t my call, and I didn’t know how much he was going to add. The deadline for the proposals came and went, and I didn’t hear anything more for a couple of weeks. Finally I called the guy to see where we were. “Oh,” he said, ‘we came in as the second-lowest bidder.” Great. The guy was so brilliant he outsmarted himself. “But don’t worry,” he went on. “The fix is in. Bob, our lead partner, went to high school with Cadovra’s CIO.” Cadovra had gone through a couple of CIOs since I worked there, and I didn’t know this guy – but from the list of problems in the RFP, it didn’t sound like anything had changed. “His family and theirs go to Hawaii together every Christmas. You’ve gotta understand, this is going to work out.” If that was true, I’m not sure why they needed me to do their proposal in the first place, but that wasn’t my call either.
Anyhow, instead of the thing working out, as in, “we got the bid, let’s start work”, it turned into a bunch of phone interviews and then meetings. “It’s gonna work out,” Owen kept telling me. “They just have to feel comfortable about it.” He wound up having me call the guy who would be Cadovra’s project manager for the work. The guy actually didn’t sound happy at all that his boss was making him look at our bid, and I reported that back. “Don’t worry,” Owen kept saying.
Meanwhile, this had been dragging on for weeks, and all it was paying me was the promise of maybe getting the work down the road. I hadn’t earned a penny for putting together the proposal, and I wasn’t being paid anything for the phone calls and meetings, either, since the project hadn’t actually started.
And then this guy from Canada, Gordon MacDermott, turned up in the meetings. I’ve never been sure exactly how he got there; I think he was related to someone at the consulting firm, though he didn’t work for them, and when I had a chance to chat with him, I learned he wasn’t making any more than I was – and beyond that, he was paying his own expenses to get down from Canada. I guess they were making him the same promises they were making me.
What puzzled me was that this guy Gordon was on the project – he was going to be working on it with me, the partners said – but he didn’t know a thing. He was a doofus. He’d do things like e-mail me 20-meg files of manuals I already had, which did nothing but tie up my e-mail. He had no idea of what a 20-meg file would do to e-mail, and I really didn’t feel like explaining it to him. To hear him talk, he’d been a big deal with IBM in Canada; at least he had been once. So I just put up with it, like I put up with all the phone calls and meetings and little research projects for no pay.
Then the consulting firm wanted me to go to Cadovra’s headquarters for meetings. It was starting to get a little irritating: they’d page me and e-mail me at all hours, expecting I’d spend unlimited time on this project, and they weren’t paying me. But once they had me going over to Cadovra instead of meeting at their office, I knew I had leverage if I needed it.
The meetings at Cadovra didn’t go much better than the phone call I’d made to their project manager. The same guy was chairing the meetings there. He had our proposal in front of him, the one I’d written, but which Owen had goosed up with extra hours. Even with the extra hours, the Cadovra guy thought the bid was low. “I’ve looked at this over and over,” he said. “I’ve turned it inside out and upside down. Well, it’s plain that you can do this. . .” He was very reluctant. He didn’t like the bid. I think the main problem was that I’d written it, and I’d worked there, and I knew where the bodies were buried, and I knew what needed to be done. The part-of-the-problem-club wouldn’t be happy.
“I need to run something by you,” Owen asked me over the phone a day or so after that meeting. ‘We’re running into a political problem. Would – would it be OK if we told Cadovra that Gordon was going to be our project manager? I know you might have been expecting to be that yourself. But your pay would be the same. . .” My pay, of course, was zilch up to that point.
“Sure,” I said. “Whatever will make this thing work.” But I was feeling less and less certain that this thing was in fact going to work – on the other hand, I knew I had my insurance policy.
And Gordon was starting to make unhappy noises: he was flying in and crossing the border once a week, and he was telling the immigration people he was a tourist, or he was visiting his aunt or some such. In fact, he was selling his house in Canada, which is why he was going back and forth so much, and he was going to move down here to work on the project, he thought this was going to be such a big deal. But the thing was dragging on and on, and the immigration people kept seeing his face week after week, and they were starting to ask if he was a tourist, if he was flying in and out all the time that way.
The following week, I got a call from Owen: Gordon had been stopped at the border by CBP and wouldn’t be let back in. “I know about that kind of thing,” he told me. “Once you get into their computer, it’s really hard to get out again. I think we have to say that Gordon is out of the picture now.” It didn’t bother me all that much: I never could figure out what Gordon brought to the party.
“’Now we’ve got to find someone to take his place,’ Owen went on. That was even more puzzling. Why take the place of someone who wasn’t contributing anything? But there was more: ‘I’ve been going through the resumes on the job boards. This is starting to look more complicated than I thought – I can’t tell who has the qualifications we want, and who doesn’t. I tell you what: I’m going to give you our password for the job boards, and you can look and pick out some candidates.’
“So OK, I didn’t have anything else to do that night, what the heck, I went onto the job boards and started searching, though I still wasn’t getting paid a cent for what I was doing – of course, they certainly didn’t want to pay a headhunter to do the same thing. It was pretty interesting to see who was out of work and looking. Some of the same guys who’d created the problem at Cadovra, in fact; I knew them when I was there. No way I was going to suggest any of them, of course. But then the picture started to become clear: there was nobody on any of the job boards who was qualified to do what Cadovra and the consultants wanted done. I knew some guys who could do it, but they weren’t on the market then. A headhunter might be able to shake them loose, but that wasn’t my job, and these guys didn’t want to pay a headhunter.
“So anyhow, I called up Owen the next day and spelt it out to him. I still couldn’t quite understand why they wanted someone else for the work; I’d scoped out the whole proposal on the basis of just one guy doing it, and that was me. Why they’d even wanted to bring Gordon in from Canada was something I could never figure out.
But then Owen did something else I couldn’t figure out. He got mad. ‘You know what I think you’re doing?’ he asked me. ‘I think you’re deliberately not telling me about all the guys on the job board who are qualified.’
“’Why would I do that?’ I asked him. “I’m still on the project, right? If you want somebody in addition, that’s your call, but I’m already qualified – after all, I put together the proposal. I’m just telling you there’s nobody else on the job boards right now who comes even close to being qualified. But I scoped out the work on the basis of one guy doing it anyhow. There’s not that much to the job.”
Owen still grumbled, and we ended the call after that. Then it dawned on me: they’d had this neat idea that they were going to get me to put together a winning proposal and do all the preliminary selling on the thing for free, on the basis that I’d think I would get the contract to do the work. But I suddenly realized what they had in mind: they were going to ding me out of the thing and hire somebody who’d work more cheaply than I would.
Well, as I said, I had a Plan B. I waited for Owen to call me again on my cell phone. He called me all the time with little instructions to do this and that. I just let that call fall through. Next thing you know, he e-mailed me, complaining that I hadn’t picked up his call. That meant I could e-mail him back, and that was important, because from that point on, I needed to have things in writing. What I said in writing was
Hi, Owen, sorry I couldn’t pick up your call. I’m a little puzzled, because you’re giving me the impression that I’m on call for your project, when as you know I haven’t been paid for any of my work so far, and in fact we haven’t even finalized an agreement as to when any pay will start and how much I’ll be paid. You’ve had me attend several meetings on Cadovra’s premises, though, which unfortunately creates a dual-employment situation. If it were necessary, I could go to Cadovra claiming they’d created a situation where I de facto worked for both you and them, and if you won’t pay me, I can go after Cadovra. We need to discuss this.
It took about 20 minutes for my cell to ring again. “I talked to our attorney,” Owen said. I knew he hated that; if he didn’t want to pay a headhunter and he didn’t want to pay me, he sure didn’t want to pay his attorney. “We’ll work something out.”
Darn right he was going to work something out. The one thing he didn’t want was anything that would get Cadovra pissed off, since he was expecting to get business out of them, and his partner Bob – at least, that’s what he claimed – went to Hawaii every Christmas with their CIO. I’d just be claiming a few thousand, but that would be the end of any work they’d ever get out of Cadovra. “Sure, Owen,” I told him. “But just to be on the safe side, let’s make sure all our communication is via e-mail from now on.”
Sure enough, he sent me an e-mail right away asking me to total up the hours I’d spent and the rate I wanted. He was going to run it by the attorney, of course, but I knew I’d get something pretty close to what I asked for. And I did. It came via overnight the next day. At least I got something for the time I’d spent, which I knew I would, or I wouldn’t have let it go that far. I never heard if Owen ever found anyone who could do the work they’d outlined in the proposal. Somehow I doubt it, and I never found out if Bob and his family went to Hawaii with the CIO that Christmas.
