I don’t mean to rub in the fact that I’m going on vacation soon, but the few remaining hurdles that I have to clear before I can shift my attention to our upcoming trip to Hawaii are dwindling down. Unfortunately, they’re pretty damned massive.

Every so often, I regale my friends who don’t work at the University with stories about the ridiculous nature of the bureaucracy here, and many times they think I’m making it up. Here’s a story that falls directly into that category.

Natalie and I have been working for quite some time on putting together a letter of intent for a program that we want to run next summer (’09) for which we need quite a bit of money. We identified a particular Foundation that we wanted to approach for funding because the Foundation has a lot of money and has previously funded other projects that focus on the same sort of topic.

So, off we trot to our friendly Grants Person in the college who is ostensibly there to “help.” Our friendly Grants Person is bubbly and cheerful and very detailed and doesn’t laugh in our faces at all when we pitch the idea and thinks it’s a great idea for us to try to raise the money.

But — uh oh! — the Foundation that we want to go to is a Big Donor to the University. That means that we have to first get permission from the Big Donor Office before we can to the Foundation because even though the Foundation gives grants, it’s up to the Big Donor Office to decide who from our University gets to apply for them. (In other words, someone locally gets to decide whether we’re important enough to apply for money.)

We met with Friendly Grants Person on a Thursday. She happily volunteered to contact someone she knew in the Big Donor Office to pitch the idea and see if us lowly riff-raff types could proceed forward. And so she did — a copy of the e-mail was in my inbox before I got back to my office.

And so we waited for a response.

And waited.

And waited.

The following Friday, not having heard a thing from Friendly Grants Person, Natalie sent her an e-mail to ask if she’d had a response. It turned out that she had. It also turned out that the response had come almost immediately, and for some reason Friendly Grants Person hadn’t passed it along to us.

To our pleasant surprise, Big Donor Office said that our project sounded like a good match, and gave us the green light. Yay! So, Natalie and I polished the proposal, and then Natalie sent it off to Friendly Grants Person for one final look before we sent it to the Foundation.

And then came a message from Friendly Grants Person: “Oh, wait!” she said. “I totally forgot. You have to send this through the Office of Rubber Stamping for approval before you can send it to the Foundation. Remember, the ORS puts on indirect cost sharing on all proposals, so you need to add 50% to your budget. I think that makes your budget too high for the Foundation. Also, I think maybe you need to rewrite the proposal to emphasize another aspect of the program altogether.”

Natalie and I do a collective double-take. What? So, we re-write the proposal, choke on the 50% we have to add in that we’ll never see, and send it back to Friendly Grants Person.

“Looks good!” she says. “I’ll send it to the Office of Rubber Stamping.”

And we wait.

And wait.

And wait.

After a week, I e-mail her to ask if she ever sent it to the Office of Rubber Stamping.

“Oh, sorry,” Friendly Grants Person says. “I wasn’t here last week.” (Interesting, considering we sent it to her on a Friday and she responded but never mentioned that tidbit.) “I’ll do it right now!”

24 hours later, I get a copy of the electronic submission notice that you get when something goes over to the Office of Rubber Stamping. So much for “right now.”

Exactly eight hours later, someone from the Office of Rubber Stamping calls me.

“Um, about this proposal of yours,” she says.
“It’s a letter of intent,” I say.
“It’s a letter of intent?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
[dead silence.]
“Friendly Grants Person told me that we needed to send it to you.”
“O … kay.”
“Is that not true?”
“Well, I can definitely send it up for approval, but this budget isn’t going to work.”
“That’s not a budget.”
“It’s not?”
(I fail to add in the phrase, “Yes, if you had read our three page letter, you would see that” before I say) “It’s the overall budget for the project. We’re not necessarily asking the Foundation for all of the money. I mean, we’d like it, but it’s not a formal request.”
[sound of fingers drumming. Then ... ] “I don’t know if I can get approval of this with the budget in there.”
“So … you’d like me to take the budget out of my letter of intent?”
“That would be very helpful,” she says.

So, to clarify: I was asked to remove the budget and all monetary figures from my grant proposal to the Foundation. Still with me?

This was right as I was leaving yesterday. Natalie got back from Brazil yesterday, and I wasn’t going to make this change without talking to her first. The Woman from the Office of Rubber Stamping called twice this morning (hangups, no message) and then sent an e-mail asking if I’d revised the letter yet.

At noon, I went over and crashed a lecture that I knew Natalie was attending (because it was by the person that she flew back from Brazil with) to explain the situation. “At this point,” I told her, “I don’t even want to submit the damned thing anymore.”

“Do what needs to be done,” she said.

I took out the budget and sent it back to the Office of Rubber Stamping.

Forty-five minutes later, I got an e-mail from Friendly Grants Person. To make a very long story very short, it turns out that we didn’t need to send the letter of intent to the Office of Rubber Stamping at all, and we can include a total budget request in the letter. “Go ahead and submit it,” she said.

And I did. Quickly. Before anyone changes their minds.

All told, getting a three page letter off to the Foundation has taken five weeks. It’s going to take them six to respond.

I swear, it’s a wonder anything gets done around here …