“The only disability is one’s refusal to adapt” – Alpha 7 is done!
The last three months were full of unforeseen challenges for me.
Went to Malaysia to update my team in person and guess what? Everything tore apart! Meetings went fine as usual, but a couple of days in, we encountered a huge operational problem.
Trump administration’s embargoes against Iran, hit us too which is pretty devastating as we have no ties to any Iran-based entities or organizations. We’re not even based in Iran. But as I was born in Iran, and I’m the director of the company, banks of Malaysia decided to close my personal and our company’s account. You have no idea how simple things like a small money transaction now is a big headache for us. It sucks as I’m the only member of our team with Iran nationality and I don’t want to even start with pointing out how unfair, unreasonable, silly, and irrational the case-based applying of these embargoes is.
To make our last couple of weeks of 2018 even more challenging, The company that owns the software we partially used to coordinate our team members and hold our remote working sessions, named Slack also decided to terminate our team account because they noticed someone (me) logged in form Iran. These events hindered our progress substantially. You see? December has been once again full of surprises for me.
Guess what I did after all?
Burst into a rage for a day or two, accepted the things I can’t change; unfair embargoes, put some more effort on things I can change; readjusting ourselves, moving to alternative software solutions, and Bingo! Despite all the challenges we released alpha 7. Hope 2019 be a drastically better year for me personally and professionally.
Happy new year
Cheers!