They did ask her. Sure, they could have asked how many instead, but it probably came in a 100 count well within any significant mass margins, so they just asked if 100 would be enough.
Procurement for business/government/military (including and especially NASA), is very different than what you would see on a shelf at your local drug store.
The drug store can’t buy a single box of tampons. They have to get an entire case of boxes of tampons. If each box is say, 20 tampons, and there’s more than 5 of those per case, then they’re buying at least 100 tampons so they can get a single box of them.
There’s a lot of alternatives they could have looked into, like neighboring government institutions which may already stock them, asking them to supply a smaller quantity than they would have needed to order, or ordering outside of their typical channels and sending the intern down the road to buy a box from the nearest pharmacy… Those things wouldn’t really get accounted for in their budgeting though… So they would prefer to order through their normal distribution.
It’s a funny comment to make to Ride, “is 100 enough?” And I’m sure everyone had a good chuckle.
Regardless they probably didn’t see another good option for ordering other than to just buy a case of them and figure out the rest later.
Don’t agencies have some kind of de minimis threshold for just running out to the store and buying basic stuff? I thought that’s why the DOGE freeze of government credit cards a few months ago was causing labs to cancel experiments and employees paying out of pocket to feed horses and working dogs.
So the military does have a strict procurement process for rocket fuel, but they generally refuel their civilian vehicles (vans and such) with a government credit card at normal gas stations.
It depends. What area is the vehicle operating in, what resources are available in the area, both from internal department, intra department, and external/public…
There’s a lot of factors to consider.
I won’t pretend to know what factors got them to that point, but bluntly, it doesn’t really matter. Some set of circumstances created the conditions where such a question needed to be asked.
They definitely come in 100 counts. This part isn’t speculation. I have no Idea what NASA procurement looks like though, and I don’t have anyone to ask.
They did ask her. Sure, they could have asked how many instead, but it probably came in a 100 count well within any significant mass margins, so they just asked if 100 would be enough.
A 100-count box seems like an absurdly large unit size. Are you doing the very thing that the anecdote is intended to highlight?
Procurement for business/government/military (including and especially NASA), is very different than what you would see on a shelf at your local drug store.
The drug store can’t buy a single box of tampons. They have to get an entire case of boxes of tampons. If each box is say, 20 tampons, and there’s more than 5 of those per case, then they’re buying at least 100 tampons so they can get a single box of them.
There’s a lot of alternatives they could have looked into, like neighboring government institutions which may already stock them, asking them to supply a smaller quantity than they would have needed to order, or ordering outside of their typical channels and sending the intern down the road to buy a box from the nearest pharmacy… Those things wouldn’t really get accounted for in their budgeting though… So they would prefer to order through their normal distribution.
It’s a funny comment to make to Ride, “is 100 enough?” And I’m sure everyone had a good chuckle.
Regardless they probably didn’t see another good option for ordering other than to just buy a case of them and figure out the rest later.
Don’t agencies have some kind of de minimis threshold for just running out to the store and buying basic stuff? I thought that’s why the DOGE freeze of government credit cards a few months ago was causing labs to cancel experiments and employees paying out of pocket to feed horses and working dogs.
So the military does have a strict procurement process for rocket fuel, but they generally refuel their civilian vehicles (vans and such) with a government credit card at normal gas stations.
At least that’s how I understand it.
It depends. What area is the vehicle operating in, what resources are available in the area, both from internal department, intra department, and external/public…
There’s a lot of factors to consider.
I won’t pretend to know what factors got them to that point, but bluntly, it doesn’t really matter. Some set of circumstances created the conditions where such a question needed to be asked.
They definitely come in 100 counts. This part isn’t speculation. I have no Idea what NASA procurement looks like though, and I don’t have anyone to ask.
It’s either super complicated and expensive tampons with certification or some employee being send to the nearest supermarket