Oh, man, I nearly had heart failure today. That’s a medical term my grandmother used to throw around fairly loosely. Anything from a spider to a clap of thunder could trigger heart failure, back in the day. I hadn’t thought much about the dreaded condition until this afternoon, when I suddenly wondered if I’d cost the company three hundred thousand dollars.

I can’t even write out the number. It’s just too scary.

The bid I sent off Monday was opened this morning. Early this afternoon I got an email from the agency that put the project out to bid, letting me know that the company was the apparent low bidder. Then I scrolled down and saw the price, and it was wrong. It was supposed to be $520,000, but they’d listed our bid at $250,000.

In other words, if the bid was accepted, we would lose more money than we could afford to lose. There’s no reason to think they wouldn’t accept that price, since it was about half a million dollars lower than the only other bid they got. At that moment it seemed almost certain to me that it was my fault. I had to have transposed the 5 and the 2 and sent it off to LA.

Since I had kept a copy of the entire bid package, I searched through it for the bad news. The file is an inch thick, and the bid price page is somewhere in the middle, so by the time I’d leafed through the pages three times and not found it, I was frantic. As I shuffled those sheets, my heart was pounding faster and faster, and my breathing got more and more shallow.

It’s a good thing I found what I was looking for before I passed out completely. Naturally, I had copied the number exactly as the Boss had given it to me, starting with the 5. The mistake was theirs, not mine. All could be resolved with a phone call.

So I called the Boss, and told him to make the call to LA and straighten them out. That wasn’t a call I was prepared to make myself, after what I’d just been through. I think I’m still a little shaky, all these many hours later. I take things seriously, and I take three hundred thousand dollars extremely seriously.

And of course the people at the agency freely admitted that they had transposed the numbers when they read the bids. We are still the apparent low bidder, but now, with our real price, we’re well over their engineer’s estimate (about double, in fact). So it remains to be seen if we’ll be awarded a contract. But at least we won’t be awarded a contract that we can’t complete, because of an error I very well might have made.