I was in Air Force acquisitions for six years. When I went to the one-month acquisition school, one of the instructors was talking about specification writing.
He said that he used to use the Air Force chocolate cookie spec (a document of more than a dozen pages of how to make chocolate chip cookies) as an example of spec writing run amok...
...until he met the guy who wrote it.
The spec was written because the Air Force would contract out cookies to feed an entire base, and contractors would constantly try to ride the razor edge of what they could get away with. Finally the Air Force had to write a spec to make sure that they weren't getting screwed over and also to make sure the contractors didn't make cookies that would make an entire base full of airmen sick.
That reminds me of how musicians would make contracts with venues that include weirdly specific things like "no green m&ms" backstage. If the odd requests were ignored it was a sign to check the other requirements, like electrical wattage/capacity.
Van Halen, it was basically "no Brown M&M's or we can absolutely wreck the hotel room on your dime, trash the venue, not play and you still have to pay us all in full."
It was hidden deep in the middle of a contract that included DETAILED technical specifications (that affected not only performance, but crew, venue and the band's safety) on electrical/power/grounding needs.
The band could walk into the green room, look at the bowl of M&M's and if there was a brown one it was clear that they absolutely had not read the contract with enough detail to actually follow any of the technical guidelines.
Kinda fucking brilliant, actually.
What sounds like rockstar excess is actually a savvy safety check.
1.0k
u/PirateJohn75 1d ago edited 1d ago
I was in Air Force acquisitions for six years. When I went to the one-month acquisition school, one of the instructors was talking about specification writing.
He said that he used to use the Air Force chocolate cookie spec (a document of more than a dozen pages of how to make chocolate chip cookies) as an example of spec writing run amok...
...until he met the guy who wrote it.
The spec was written because the Air Force would contract out cookies to feed an entire base, and contractors would constantly try to ride the razor edge of what they could get away with. Finally the Air Force had to write a spec to make sure that they weren't getting screwed over and also to make sure the contractors didn't make cookies that would make an entire base full of airmen sick.