VendorWatch '08: The search is over and the race is on

Last week, MHRC finally chose a vendor for their radiology equipment, and of course it was Vendor 2, the obnoxious people who keep putting up resistance about gettin gthings done as fast as MHRC wants them done. We had a meeting on Monday with the consultants and Vendor 2 reps, except the annoying technical rep that I've been dealing with wasn't there-it was the lead sales guy (nice) and a technical rep that was filling in when the snarky guy called in sick at the last minute. This fill-in guy was much more useful and technically helpful than Slick, the guy I've been dealing with at Vendor 2.

At any rate, we spent literally three and a half hours asking questions and getting answers, going back and forth, discussing how different cables or pipes or joists or whatever affected each piece of equipment. Squidwort kept trying to push the discussion along, and I can't say I blame him, but I knew this wasn't going to be a short meeting. Everyone has lots of questions and needs to get answers so they can finish drawings on the changes necessitated by a fianl equipment selection and issue it to the field in time to keep from slowing down construction, which is underway and about to start working double shifts to finish on time.

If that last sentence confused and exhausted you just reading it, imagine what it does to me writing and living through it. Tomorrow is all meetings, all day. MHRC in the morning, then a sitewalk for a possible OR expansion in a suburb of Denver. In addition, tomorrow is 11 years since my dad died, so I'm really not in the mood to suffer fools. Between stupid people bothering me today and the possibility of stupid people bothering me tomorrow, I'm on the edge of physically choking someone. I nearly punched Guy this evening when he commented on how I washed clothes. "You have to put the soap in, then let the water run or it won't all go into the wash." Hmm, how can I suffocate him so that CSI: Denver won't trace it to me?

So, I'm trying to plan for lots of breathing and swallowing words that I know are due to temporary stress (even if they do deserve a verbal beating).

In the meantime, I hope everyone got a chance to see "American Dad" on Fox on Sunday night. The entire episode was a James-Bond parody.


Throughout the episode, Roger the alien (who plays the enemy, Tearjerker) keeps having problems with his evil lair--the floor breaks open when the henchmen fall to the floor, the slide into the pool for drowning people isn't steep enough for the person to actually slide off into the pool, and the ropes that extend from the evil blimp to the evil lair for the henchmen to slide down don't retract. So, through the whole episode, Tearjerker is on the phone with his contractor: "Mike, dammit, come over here and fix this place! And don't send your son--he smells like weed!" Guy and I laughed our asses off at the episode.