Week #476

Friday, March 27th, 02020 at 22:22 UTC

This week shares its name with 476 Hedwig, a main belt asteroid, Minuscule 476, 218 parchment leaves covering the four Gospels, and US Public Law 79-476 which chartered the Civil Air Patrol.

This week we’ve taken the government’s offer to continue to partial pay employee’s wages. We’ve reduced our time down to 50%. There are projects are currently on going, but main others will dry-up or have ended this week.

Several of our potential school surveys are in jeopardy if schools are closed. That’s lost revenue which was used to pay salaries. Another other source of income was the O’Reilly surveys. This week O’Reilly Media pulled the plug on all their in-person conferences. Over the years we’ve done a lot with them, from presentations to booth design to survey work. All of our close contacts have been let go and at least two on going projects are now most-likely going unpaid. (At least it wasn’t many hours) Those projects and opportunities are now gone.

There might be some hope to rekindle some projects in the future once the dust settles. Many of those who were let go will find new jobs and will have new projects and hopefully look back to us for help. Time will tell.

This week we were white-listed by the last local telco for our robocall number. It took a long time from our first support ticket to complaining enough, to finally both getting them to fix their system and to white-list us. Now we can’t ever let it go!

We also are doing our best to continue our pair programming efforts, but with us decreasing our time, lots of school and company closure and social distancing, it is becoming more and more impractical to find weekly times to meet-up in-person. We all want to continue the work, but will need to find new ways of continuing. This source of income isn’t gone, but drying-up for sure. As with everything, there is no guarantee from week-to-week that the client won’t go under (start-up life) or no longer need your services and end the agreement. So this was never expected to be a long term commitment or be a big impact on the company’s revenue.

It is tax season, so we’ve been finalising a bunch of little things with the accountant to finish-up the annual reports. Hagstofa, the local state stats organization, requested information about all our international income and expenses. So we spent some time digging-up old invoices and categorising them.

Finally, this week we had a short call with an interesting company doing financial stock picks (not actual trades, just predictions and trends). We’re doing a bit of due diligence on behalf of someone else into the success rates of all the picks.

We’ll try to keep the weeknotes going, but we suspect it will be less and less action each week and things might get spread out further between updates.