You know you've been a fed too long when . . .

DAILY BRIEFING

You know you've been a fed too long when . . .

You're at a dinner party, chatting about this and that, when suddenly it seems the perfect time to discuss that negotiated rulemaking you've been working on for six months. You're throwing out references to the Federal Register, to FACA clauses, to "achieving full consensus." You don't even notice the crowd dissipating rapidly around you.

Mike Fischetti, president of the National Contract Management Association's Washington chapter, raised a warning flag to government acquisition specialists in remarks at a recent reception.

"You know you've been in goverment acquisition too long if you answer yes to more than one of the following questions," Fischetti said. Civil servants outside the acquisition community may find they, too, could be guilty of some of the following transgressions.

• You ask the waiter what the restaurant's core competencies are.
• You decide to re-organize your family into a "team-based" organization.
• You refer to dating as market research.
• You can spell "paradigm."
• You actually know what a paradigm is.
• You write executive summaries for your love letters.
• Your Valentine's Day cards have bullet points.
• You celebrate your wedding anniversary by conducting a past-performance evaluation.
• You explain to your bank manager that you prefer to think of yourself as "highly leveraged" rather than "in debt."
• You end every argument with your spouse by saying, "let's talk about this off-line."
• You talk to the waiter about process flow and IDEF modeling when your dinner arrives late.
• You refer to your previous love as "my sunk life cycle cost."
• You insist on performing an analysis of alternatives before you and your spouse produce another child.
• Your deliverables on Sunday evening are clean laundry, a mowed lawn and paid bills.
• You ask the car salesman if the new car comes with a white board and Internet connection.
• You give constructive feedback to your dog.
• As coach of your six year old's soccer team, you hand out CD-ROM deskbooks of best practices of their last game for review during practice.
• Instead of breaking up with your boyfriend or girlfriend, you prefer to perform a debriefing.
• Instead of divorcing your spouse, you consider performing a re-competition.
• You refer to having an affair as an outsourcing of your requirements and refer to your spouse as the incumbent.
• You refer to a good beer commercial as a successful use of electronic commerce.
• You can't decide what to buy at the grocery store without forming an IPT with your spouse and children first.
• You call a grocery list a source selection plan, and refer to the coupons as award fees.
• Finally, you refer to your relationship with your children as a "mentor-protege" relationship.