The Christmas Day silent-inbox note
Nothing is shipping today. No buyer is responding. No clarification question is getting answered. This is the correct default, and here is why we built the system around it.
Nothing is shipping today. No buyer is answering clarification questions. No portal is accepting submissions under a deadline that is not manufactured. This is not a coincidence. It is the correct default, and it took us longer than it should have to build the system around it.
The old default
Proposal teams historically operated on a posture that any deadline that landed on a holiday would be honored with the same vigilance as a deadline that landed on a Tuesday. A December 25th deadline was responded to on December 24th; a December 30th deadline got its gold-team review on December 28th. The team rotated the on-call role among the people most willing to absorb the hit. The people most willing were almost always the same people, year after year.
This was a short-sighted default. It taught the function that holidays were negotiable. It taught the buyer that holidays were negotiable. It created a compounding expectation that no matter when the deadline landed, somebody would be there.
The new default
The new default is that nothing ships on December 25th unless it absolutely has to, and absolutely has to is a much smaller set than the team thought. Most of the bids with December 25th deadlines have been quietly negotiated for a 27th or 28th submission window. Most of the clarification questions are parked in a queue until the 26th. Most of the portals are down for maintenance anyway.
The exceptions — real government deadlines that do not move for any holiday, genuine emergencies, a BAFO window that cannot shift — are the exceptions. They are handled by the on-call secondary, with a runbook and a named decision-of-last-resort authority, and compensated with real time off in January. They are not handled by pretending the 25th is a normal day.
Why this matters beyond the team
Because the example propagates. If the proposal function responds on December 25th, the sales function will write into contracts that proposal responses are due on December 25th, the buyer will continue to post RFPs with December 25th deadlines, and the category’s norm will remain that holidays are work days for everybody in the response chain. If the proposal function closes on December 25th, the sales function adjusts, the buyer adjusts, and the category moves one increment toward a sane norm.
This is slow work. It will not move in a year. It will move across a decade if enough teams make the explicit choice.
What the on-call is doing today
Drinking coffee. Watching a phone in case a portal outage creates a genuine emergency. Otherwise, not working. The runbook is on the fridge. The handoff email went out on the 22nd. The quiet bids are tagged. If nothing escalates, the secondary reads a book and gets their day off next Tuesday to compensate. The team operates tomorrow.
This is not a heroic posture. It is the minimum-viable version of treating your people like they have lives outside the proposal function. It is also the version that, compounded over five years, changes whether proposal work is a career or a burnout waiting to happen.
Merry Christmas. Back on the 26th.