Bizarre indeed. The fact is, on every occasion in the last
three months that we have submitted grants.gov proposals, our experience
has been excellent if we submitted at least three to four days prior
to the deadline. I believe there are serious capacity issues and it
is inevitable that one will have difficulties even beginning the morning
of the deadline. One the west coast we lose three hours off that, so we
are already at a disadvantage, but when the system bogs down and you call
the grants.gov folks for advice, I assure you from personal experience
that the following "solutions" I've been offered are/are not
true:
1. Move the file to your desktop. FALSE. This is a grants.gov urban
legend. We have no problems submitting files located on the server when
we submit days prior to the deadline. When they are at capacity, the
problem then is simply getting in the door, and placing your file on to
your desktop won't do that for you; rather, you just have to keep
reloading 'til you hit a break.
2. Use Shift key for uppercase letters, not Caps Lock. TRUE, but it seems
like they could advise us of this as we submit rather than after we've
failed...
3. Clean cache and remove cookies. FALSE, unless your machine is very
slow anyway and overloaded.
4. Don't use a laptop. FALSE. This one almost had me in stitches, since
my Dell laptop is 2 ghz with an 80 meg hard drive and 1 gig of ram
operating on Internet II, and the proposal was for me to move to any
desktop because "they just work better" for this operation.
With just a few minutes left to submit (after starting in the morning), I
felt more like crying than laughing, however.
5. "Your credentials are invalid." Maybe, but not likely if you
submitted successfully the previous day or days. But go ahead, if you
have time, and call the credentials provider to verify your credentials;
in the meantime, however, don't stop trying to upload.
I am serious when I suggest that all of these "problems" are
fruitless attempts to avoid dealing straight with us on the capacity
problem; it's like the classic comedy skit when Lucy and Ethel are trying
to package chocolates and get behind and start stuffing chocolates
everywhere but in the boxes they're meant to fill... our proposals are
going into cyberspace rather than holding boxes for the grant
agencies.
Until the grants.gov system capacity is increased, the only way to avoid
the disasters so many of us are experiencing is to get the word out to
our faculty and submit days prior to the deadline.
Winnie Ennenga
At 5/12/2005 01:02 PM, Roberta Truscello wrote:
How bizarre. That is worthy of a
Twilight Zone episode.
Roberta
At 03:48 PM 5/12/2005, you wrote:
I just submitted a NOAA/OESD
application using the required e-submission
at grants.gov and I must admit that this virgin's experience wasn't
the
most pleasurable! I met the deadline with barely 30 minutes to
spare!!!
I'm familiar with the fastlane get'R done early because the server
will
be busy, but it still took over 2 hours to get the darn thing
submitted.
I must admit, the files are easy to use, checking accuracy, no
problem
but when it comes to hitting that submit button, rejection was
assured.
After several discussions with the very pleasant grants.gov folks
we
finally discovered the problem. THIS IS GOOD! Turns out that if
your
password has more than one capitol letter within it and those
letters
happen to be next to each other, you MUST press and release the
shift
key with each letter. Of course that was after I had to remove the
file
from it's very organized location in my drive space to the desktop,
clean all internet files from my browser and remove all cookies but
that
didn't seem to make a difference until I pressed and lifted my shift
key
for each capitol letter in my password. UGH!
Lidia Nonn
Director, Institute for Research
University of Wisconsin - Green Bay
2420 Nicolet Drive WH 303A
Green Bay, WI 54311-7001
920.465.2565
920.465.2784 (Office)
920.465.2043 (Fax)
xxxxxx@uwgb.edu
http://www.uwgb.edu/research
"Lose not thine airspeed lest the ground rise up and smite
thee"
-----Original Message-----
From: Research Administration List
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Northern Arizona University
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Telephone: 928/523-8319 Fax: 928/523-1075