Sales pitches from Chinese board shops should come with arthritis medication.

Dramatis PersonaE (in order of appearance):

1. Saleswomen from Chinese printed circuit board fabricators, all with curiously westernized first names.
2. Marketing types trying to sell me lists of attendees at nonexistent trade shows.
3. Serial killers.
4. Clowns (sometimes indistinguishable from #3). Generally speaking, disturbing.
5. SBA-approved loans. (I have one qualified offer right now from capitaldrip.com. I’m not making this up.)
6. Webinars about I-9 forms and Covid-19 mitigation and prevention.
7. Virtual trade shows (and the people lurking behind them).
8. SAM renewal.
9. Persons wanting me to sell our business.
10. Search engine optimization (SEO) companies, which often lead to:
11. Website developers from India named Mike.

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If only defects were in as short supply as logic and wisdom.

This is what happens when the pyramid inverts and falls on little old unsuspecting you. Just what you deserve for minding your own business.

“We need to audit your quality system. You’re a new vendor with contingent qualification. We can’t make it permanent without an audit.”

What do you mean we’re a new vendor? We’ve been doing business with you for 11 years.

“Doesn’t matter. New regime in place. Since you’re a great big unknown to us, who are new, consider yourself, as we do, a new vendor. Clean slate. Get used to it. Plus, you had a recent test escape, and we need to determine the root cause. Might as well do the full workup.”

So rampant was coronavirus, it even infected accounting systems.

Day 1: Today the authorities announced local shelter-in-place restrictions. All employees of nonessential businesses must stay home or be subject to fines if caught at the workplace. What to do? Set priorities: define whether we are essential and be prepared to back it up if we are. There is no Essential Business Department in California, like the DMV, to which one can apply and get a Certification of Essentiality. No tests one takes. It depends on one’s OEM customers and flows down to their suppliers. For those of us not named Elon Musk, we are not a law unto ourselves.

Day 2: Met with the crew. Game plan time. Henceforth, the old guys (the “over 60s”) will stay home. That includes (gulp) me. Aging and mortality in one poignant bite. A small crew will remain at our facility, handling day-to-day essential business. (In the preceding 24 hours, we established our corporate essential bonafides.) Headcount will fluctuate daily, depending on happenings. Some will stay home today; others will do likewise tomorrow. I stay home every day pondering the Darwinian way of the world, and my humbling new lot in life as a high medical risk individual. Regardless of work site, all employees will continue to be paid for the foreseeable future. As if we can foresee it. No one will burn PTO if they must stay home. Engineering work will be conducted from home to the extent possible. No onsite customer visits will be allowed until further notice. Living a paradox: keeping it all together, while dispersed. Here we are.

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Can a head in the sand avoid a corpse in the water?

“We’re line down.”

Sorry to hear that. (Not really, but fake empathy makes them feel better.) They got the job as the low bidder. You reap what you sow.

“We’ve been building this product for five years. That’s 22,846 units manufactured successfully and counting.”

Congratulations. You just confirmed the adage that one “oh s--t” equals one million “attaboys.”

“Not a single electrocuted hot-tubber in that time.”

How reassuring. It is of such integral services as these that our gross national product is composed.