"So you want to play the "NUKE GAME!"
For those of you on my twitter account or Linkedin saw my line this morning. I am competing on a job were my competition has been trying gouge my client big time, while they are the incumbent, over $125,000 of gouging to me is rapacious, but they got caught and are now selling fear, uncertainty and doubt to cover the fact that they tried to put their client over a barrel and do nasty things. Four times they have tried to lower their price to get close to the first price we offered the customer. But their FUD and the connivance of our mutual supplier, who is looking out for the Partner relationship, and their own bottom line and not necessarily the best interests of the customer have got the customer actually feeling okay about the barrel bending exercise. Go figure. So today with nothing to lose, really, we decided to play the "NUKE GAME" Here is the story
In 1975 as part of the Bicentennial Celebration, a group of people put together a large-scale LARP "Wargame" based upon the Battles of Lexington and Concord. 2200 High School students, 7 high schools, covering parts of the cities of San Mateo, Burlingame, and Millbrae. As part of this process we had to recruit, adult "umpires" we used the Army, Marines (who saw this as a great recruiting exercise) and we also sought out college students especially those taking History.
We would go into History or PolySci classroom and do our little spiel and then try to sign some of the students up. In a history class at Skyline College, after the spiel, the Professor told a story of his experience. To get through college he took Army ROTC, and after graduation was posted as a very junior staff officer at NATO HQs in Belgium. There was to be a scheduled war game exercise, it was to last 10 days or two weeks, and this junior LT's. job was to be the guy standing on the latter moving the markers around in a "battle" between the Warsaw Pact and NATO forces. Three big rooms, one for the NATO guys to plan one for the Warsaw Pact to plan, the middle room that had the big map on the wall and the professor on the ladder to move to little flags around
So everything starts in the morning and Warsaw being the attackers moves first. The Warsaw Pact is commanded by an American four-star general who gives the orders etc, and then the computer crunches the numbers, and spits out the result, one of these is that a Russian armor column breaks through the NATO front and moves into the interior of Germany. All this takes a couple of hours. Then the WP guys leave and the NATO guys, also commanded by a four-start general makes there moves, and after an hour or so, the general in charge and all his buddy lesser generals get into an discussion that gets pretty heated and finally the commander turns to my staff guy hanging off the ladder and says "We have decide to use a tactical nuke on that russian tank column"..the computer crunches the result and the ladder LT removes the russian flag and puts the "nuclear" symbol on the spot the Russian flag was, the NATO guys leave and the Warsaw Pact guys lead by the cigar smoking four-star "Russian" general who looks at the board and sees the nuclear detonation marker, and ringed by cigar smoke, removes the stogie from his mouth and says and a gruff and gravelly voice, "SO they want to play the 'NUKE' game do they?!" He immediately hurls the entire stock of Warsaw Pact Tactical Nukes at the Nato forces, and then in their turn NATO throws their entire stock of Tactical Nukes back and by 4 PM on day one the 10-day/two week exercise is over and the computer declares the Warsaw Pact the winner because 12% of its forces are left while only 6% of the NATO forces survive.
"So you wanna play the NUKE game" has become vernacular amongst my friends to whom I have told the story that when someone does something that raises the stakes, like aiming for the cup, or hitting harder than necessary, or dropping their price three times after each time the customer asked for a "best and final price" and to cover your mistake(s) sell FUD and co-opt the manufacturer to try to cover up the fact that you have greedily or stupidly or both over-bid, try to imply that our aggressive price is somehow dishonest, when at the end of the day you tried four times to reduce you price to meet our first one. Well, the NUKE game is on. We may both glow in the dark, but you only brought it on yourself.
In 1975 as part of the Bicentennial Celebration, a group of people put together a large-scale LARP "Wargame" based upon the Battles of Lexington and Concord. 2200 High School students, 7 high schools, covering parts of the cities of San Mateo, Burlingame, and Millbrae. As part of this process we had to recruit, adult "umpires" we used the Army, Marines (who saw this as a great recruiting exercise) and we also sought out college students especially those taking History.
We would go into History or PolySci classroom and do our little spiel and then try to sign some of the students up. In a history class at Skyline College, after the spiel, the Professor told a story of his experience. To get through college he took Army ROTC, and after graduation was posted as a very junior staff officer at NATO HQs in Belgium. There was to be a scheduled war game exercise, it was to last 10 days or two weeks, and this junior LT's. job was to be the guy standing on the latter moving the markers around in a "battle" between the Warsaw Pact and NATO forces. Three big rooms, one for the NATO guys to plan one for the Warsaw Pact to plan, the middle room that had the big map on the wall and the professor on the ladder to move to little flags around
So everything starts in the morning and Warsaw being the attackers moves first. The Warsaw Pact is commanded by an American four-star general who gives the orders etc, and then the computer crunches the numbers, and spits out the result, one of these is that a Russian armor column breaks through the NATO front and moves into the interior of Germany. All this takes a couple of hours. Then the WP guys leave and the NATO guys, also commanded by a four-start general makes there moves, and after an hour or so, the general in charge and all his buddy lesser generals get into an discussion that gets pretty heated and finally the commander turns to my staff guy hanging off the ladder and says "We have decide to use a tactical nuke on that russian tank column"..the computer crunches the result and the ladder LT removes the russian flag and puts the "nuclear" symbol on the spot the Russian flag was, the NATO guys leave and the Warsaw Pact guys lead by the cigar smoking four-star "Russian" general who looks at the board and sees the nuclear detonation marker, and ringed by cigar smoke, removes the stogie from his mouth and says and a gruff and gravelly voice, "SO they want to play the 'NUKE' game do they?!" He immediately hurls the entire stock of Warsaw Pact Tactical Nukes at the Nato forces, and then in their turn NATO throws their entire stock of Tactical Nukes back and by 4 PM on day one the 10-day/two week exercise is over and the computer declares the Warsaw Pact the winner because 12% of its forces are left while only 6% of the NATO forces survive.
"So you wanna play the NUKE game" has become vernacular amongst my friends to whom I have told the story that when someone does something that raises the stakes, like aiming for the cup, or hitting harder than necessary, or dropping their price three times after each time the customer asked for a "best and final price" and to cover your mistake(s) sell FUD and co-opt the manufacturer to try to cover up the fact that you have greedily or stupidly or both over-bid, try to imply that our aggressive price is somehow dishonest, when at the end of the day you tried four times to reduce you price to meet our first one. Well, the NUKE game is on. We may both glow in the dark, but you only brought it on yourself.