Work stuff

It seems that the past three years of my life has been spent either working on designing and testing parts and assemblies for a government contract or working on day to day stuff while waiting to hear back from the government.  I spent almost a year at my former employer trying to figure out how to meet impossible requirements, finally the company decided to stop funding the development and killed the project.  That caused me to get laid off, exactly 4 days after starting my new job the government released the official solicitation for the contract and my new employer put me in charge of meeting one part of the requirements.  Several months of long hours and hard work later we submitted, the government evaluated, and decided that no one’s design was exactly what they were looking for.  Then in February of last year they released a new set of requirements which were only slightly less impossible to meet.  Miracle of miracles, our team managed to meet everything that was asked for based on our testing and we submitted late last summer.  In September we received word that the government had messed up their record keeping during the testing and couldn’t be sure that every competitor’s test results had been recorded properly.  So last fall we had to stop everything and build an entirely new set of samples for them to test again.  Then, about a month ago our contacts received unofficial word that our design had been selected to move on to the next stage of the evaluation.  We began building more samples and incorporating some improvements we identified during the previous two submittals.  The rumor mill indicates that all of our likely competitors have received “Thanks but no thanks” letters from the government, so far we have received nothing.  Either it’s a cruel joke and no one satisfied the government’s requirements or our design could be the only one selected!  I’m almost afraid to feel hopeful after the detours and dead ends this project has seen.