I have blogged on and off about my bid for funding that I was working on. I have been working on this project, a project to analyse videos made for Everybody Draw Muhammad Day, as a part of a post-doc project. These bids are quite involved and you do a lot of work to get them off the ground. We had more-or-less finished the writing up of the bid this last month and were getting ready to send it in.
I woke up at 1AM on Saturday morning to pee, and for some reason checked my e-mail on my iPod. I had an e-mail that I didn't see before I went to bed from the Primary Investigator on the project saying that in preparation of an internal review of the project before it went out to the funding council, she had met with some higher ups to make sure the process would go smoothly. They said the project was too high risk and shouldn't be sent for review because it wouldn't get through.
Crash. Boom. And my ten days of bad luck turned into 15.
I have a lot of feelings about the process of the application, but I'm not one to burn bridges so I will keep those to myself, for the most part. It was hard though. Take these last 11 months of e-mailing, calling, writing, working and just bin it. Done.
There's no happy ending to this story right now. I'm hoping the narrative turns around, that it can be turned around. I still have time. Time is on my side.