Comedic Relief in Writing RFPs

At one point in time, I worked with someone with whom I had alot of fun. They say those who laugh and enjoy themselves at work are generally the most productive and we were. We managed to lighten the days with lots of fun activities so that work was never work. One idea we sparked was "The Game", something you might understand if you find Request for Proposals (RFPs) very dry reading!

My friend was trying to find the definition of the word capricious as he had heard it in two different conversations within one week. Not a word one hears very often, the fact he heard it twice made for a daring idea - why not use the word in an RFP! Well our game was then born. We decided the object was to use a word from Merriam-Webster's 'word-of-the-day' website in context within a publicly posted RFP. This spawned all sorts of ideas/rules which we documented and placed on our office shared drive. We had 2 others in the office also interested in the game as a 'contest'.

Sadly, someone deleted the rules off the shared drive and neither of us found them again. We also never got the game off the ground, but believe me, we had weeks of entertainment trying to figure out how to use 'words of the day' within an RFP document without our client (end-user) noticing the strange use of words. Considering how many strange words and sentence structures are used within RFPs, we didn't think it all that probable people would notice the word use. It was also a telling statement on 1) why 'we' as RFP writers believe we should write the requirements in a similar 'legal-eze' as the template terms and conditions, and 2) how little end-users really pay attention to what is written/requested within a solicitation document. Obviously if we believed we could get away with using little known words we weren't writing plain language RFPs, and our end-users, who's requirements we were soliciting bids for, weren't paying attention to how/why we asked for things on their behalf.

It was daring entertainment, but sobering as well. We did try to engage end-users in the 'how' and 'why' we wrote RFP requirements as we did, and we also attempted to write in as plain a language as possible (soliciting medical equipment, not so easy to do plain language!)

I still peruse the RFPs issued by this friend to see if he ever manages to squeeze "capricious" into one of them. If he does, I know it'll be a statement on how little an end-user cared about articulating their needs. I'm assuming he'll do it before he retires in 8 years! I'll frame that RFP for him!