Juddmansee.com

I’ve been working crazy hours writing and assembing a white paper. It is the first of three big proposal/white paper deadlines this month. The good news is that it shipped by noon, and the customer confirmed receipt. This occured after:

• I successfully chased down 3 updates by 9:30am
• One of the sections was finished at 10:45am
• Last-minute results were added at 11:20am
• The file was converted from 45+ megs in Word to 5.5 megs in pdf to 4.1Mb zipped, within the customer’s email constraints of 4.5 megs
• I successfully connected to the internet and was able to email via Sprint broadband when our email and phone system went down in the building
• When the email bounced (the customer’s system stripped the attachment) I resent it at 11:56 with a renamed attachment that ended up going through.

This is why I have learned to put files in at least three locations, with backup communication methods (blackberry, cell and land line for phone, hotmail, gmail and work mail for email), and at least two contingency plans for any proposal (go to Starbucks to log in, drive to one of three co-worker’s homes who live within 5 miles of work to use their internet). Not to mention leaving at least an hour buffer before the deadline, even when it’s internet upload or email. It seems like more often than not, more than one thing that could go wrong, does go wrong.