Masonry Magazine June 2001 Page. 25
Attending Your First Blood
... I Mean Bid Letting
by Steve Saucerman
So you say you are about to attend your first bid letting? Well, no use being ill-prepared! Let me give you a little preview of what you'll be witnessing:
A few minutes to 2 (all bids are due by 2 PM), you enter a hazy room filled with tired, anxious people. The letters are the sterile, erect cast of characters perched behind the long table in the front of the room. The lettees are all assembled in the audience, facing the head table, doing their very best to balance their broad, builder-type bodies on the tiny, wobbly, rock-hard folding chairs provided for the proceeding.
It's Tuesday, August 17th, torridly hot, and the south-facing windows in the room the only windows in the room are painted shut. The A/C is broken and the stale, musty chamber you're about to enter hasn't completed one entire air-change in all of it's thirty-five years in existence. But it doesn't matter. This is no time to be concerned over petty human comfort. These people have assembled for a reason; a common, powerful, allying purpose. These people have assembled for.... a bid letting.
A builder's fate will be decided today.
HE WHO HESITATES
You pause momentarily in the doorway to scope the room and take in the this auspicious moment. You'll note this later as you're first mistake, for you're immediately trampled from behind by Bill Brown of B & B Builders, who is just now storming through the doorway to deliver his proposal... only seconds before the bid deadline expires. His elbow catches you square in the back and you go from vertical to horizontal in blink of an eye.
Momentarily stunned and a bit disoriented, you pick yourself up, dust off ... and BAMMM!!!... you're blind-sided once again by Ethel Frump from Cornerstone Construction, who (you've come to realize) is a rather large woman ... and surprisingly quick for her size. This time, you wise up in time to grab hold of the door frame and pull your bent, broken body out of harms way only a millisecond before three more bidders blast their way through the threshold, diving, battling and stretching for the head table... sealed proposals in hand.
You assess your situation. Your injuries appear mostly internal, so you crawl to the rear of the room and find an empty chair. The clock strikes two. The bid deadline has now passed and proposals will no longer be accepted. Herman Frail of Frail Construction didn't make it - and now lies weeping in a dejected, molten mass just inches away from the table... another sad, bid-letting statistic. Harold Hackney, the stuffy city administrator, ignores the sobbing diversion and calls the meeting to order. Though criminally over-dressed, he won't break a sweat throughout the entire ceremony. In front of him, lying on the table, are 26 yellow, legal-size envelopes that hold the proposals - all bearing the label "City of Plymouth Sludge Storage Build-