The tangled web we weave

December brings many an evening of glad-handing and back-slapping with colleagues, competitors, clients, contractors, CAD jockeys, civil engineers (soft "c" there) and all other types of people beginning with the letter "c". The holiday parties abound, and there's some good munchies to be had at these shindigs.

So tonight I went to a 20th anniversary open house of a firm that we collaborated with on a major project last year. It was a beneficial relationship, as we were beholden to the design architect and did not have to worry about paying other engineering consultants, as we WERE a consultant as well. Unfortunately the project went by way of the economy earlier this year, and when its reiteration surfaced, most of us were left out in the cold as a result of the new partnerships forged and requisite financial re-arrangements.

The following run-on sentence describes just one of the tangled webs we weave, thusly:

Last year we joined forces with an architecture firm that needed manpower to complete a large senior housing and multifamily housing apartment project with a public agency that had to demonstrate to the State that they had financing to make this thing happen so they commissioned us to complete the construction documents in such a way that it was like putting the cart before the horse (which it was) and after a long fall/winter of producing documents the rug was pulled out from under us as the economy went south and the public agency needed to find another development partner to make the deal work (which they did) although it did not include the original design team, as a matter of fact the team chosen was a client that I actually had an active project with and they chose one of our competitors to redesign the project leaving me with that feeling of a knife in buried to the hilt in between my shoulder blades that generated the question "WHY?" which will never be answered but I don't care anymore as life is too short and I have moved on and in the meantime the architect who we collaborated with is now working closely with a consultant who once worked closely with my business partner on other projects and is now going in a different direction and I don't know if there is any subtext to that (there probably is--isn't there always?) and in the meantime I rushed off to my son's band concert where I saw a construction manager who locks horns with my business partner on a fairly regular basis but is such a good guy that I try to keep work separate from socializing, though that's often unavoidable, so the upshot of all of this is that I get to see all the players at these parties and we all make nice, despite some awkward moments and suppressions of things we think but don't say.

I'm good at making nice. It's gotten me far.