We’ve responded to a proposal by a company looking to get someone to do web work, scanning work, database work, etc.

Riddler is quite upset because they want to use an experienced web company to do the web work, and use us for the production (scanning) - he’s upset that they want to get the best/cheapest/most experienced people for each portion of the contract (as they said they would in the job posting).

Riddler wants it all.

He specifically referred to them as ‘a bunch of losers’ for constantly wanting more detail from our (obviously insufficient) response.

Later, we received some background to why they responded the way they did (us for scanning, others for web), it turns out Riddler sent them a revised proposal with the following statements:

From our extensive research and interviewing scanning specialists [company] has now worked with scanning specialists and has formulated a refined approach to designing future forms to heighten accuracy of the scanning process.

That’s funny, we haven’t worked with anyone or refined any approach. We just found out what the equipment does and how much it costs for someone else to do it for us. We have absolutely 0 experience with this stuff but we just lied to them that we are experts. No wonder they want to use us for this portion. Jeezus.

Under my piece about security, Riddler added the following:

Spam and virus filtering, UPS power backup, climate control (separate from building’s internal system), 24 hour security and keycard elevator access after hours.

Umm.. this project will not involve email at all (spam), nor should they care that the third party we might hire has 24 hour keycard elevator access… This isn’t a data center.

The objective has been rewritten from my ‘web-based solution that will easily facilitate reporting of data’ to Riddler’s version:

strategy is to bring clarity to the trends that are occurring…

Please, PLEASE stop using ‘to bring clarity’ - we sound like a moronic advertisement. Is he the only one who doesn’t realize how bad this sounds?

The summary has been rewritten to the following:

We bring insight to projects, and provide strong electronic database solutions that clients can rely on.

We have never provided a database solution.

Finally, he closes the proposal with:

This project is a natural and intuitive extension of the work we are doing
on [project 1] and [project 2] will make for a seamless continuation and bring
continuity from the paper based elements to the electronic aspect of this
screening initiative.

We worked on a print project, which we fucked up requiring the manual stickering of thousands of paper forms. This is a web project with scanning, programming and database queries.

They are entirely different.

And.. we ‘bring continuity’…?? Stop the marketese!