Business-Side

If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding!  How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat!

- Pink Floyd, Another Brick in the Wall

Microsoft’s SmartScreen Filter is the bane of small Independent Software Vendors (ISV) everywhere.  Maybe that is a little harsh, and I have no proof that SmartScreen Filter is a problem for other ISVs, but it has, and as of this writing, still is a problem for Saturday Morning Productions.  Besides, that first sentence is a good sensationalist sentence, perfect for a newspaper article or blog post.

To continue our series on working with a spouse, today we explore how we physically work together and physically live together.

Disclaimer: this blog post is not meant to replace marriage counselling.

Work space

We share a work space, but not 100% of the time.  Our contracts take us to client sites a few days a week.  When our schedules coincide and we both end up in the basement at the same time, we still manage to get work done.  Chris is incredibly focused, and I have my headphones to help with my focus.

Some people ask what’s it’s like to work with a spouse. Since we at Saturday Morning Productions are all about full disclosure and basement-basedness, I thought I’d take some time to shed light on the subject.

First of all, Chris and I don’t always work together. Yes, our desks are side-by-side in the office, but we also have day jobs that take us away from the basement so it’s not like we’re always in each other’s faces like other husband and wife teams can be.

Some of our followers have asked about World vs. Canada sales that our last news post was about. “Why do you track your sales in two ways?” they ask. Well, without revealing our sales figures, we can tell you this much. We have two columns: sales to Canadian customers and sales to World customers. The Canadian customers pay $7.50 plus GST. We’re located in Alberta so we don’t charge nasty HST or any PST. The non-Canadian customers pay $7.50 and there is no tax charged on it.

We’re back in the basement and in full form after a relaxing break. (Well, Ada and DD had a nice break. Chris joined us when he could.) Thanks lovely customers for allowing us time away from our email and phones.

We took a very long driving trip as well as a staycation. Along the ways, we saw how Saturday MP fit in the spectrum of industry. If you remember back to social studies class, you learned the term cottage industry. We basement-dwellers have taken it one step further and are using our primary residence as the headquarters of our multi-dollar corporation.