I've been a bit out of commission the past few days due to Superstorm Sandy.
I was lucky to be traveling when the storm hit Hoboken hard and have stayed away all week.
But it got me thinking about how precarious the solopreneur life can be. After all, if you don't work, you don't get paid. In fact, in the NY Times yesterday, there was an article about the effect of the storm on independent workers and anyone without a salary, which is more and more of us these days.
I am grateful that my work can be done from anywhere and most of my clients aren't local. They're all over the country/continent. So I was able to keep working. But not everyone was so lucky.
One of my clients, a copywriter in NJ, couldn't work and had to extend his deadlines. Clients, of course, were accommodating, under the circumstances. But for some, it could have meant projects lost.
So I'd like to hear stories of how freelancers have coped through the last week.
Are your clients local? Did you have power? How did you handle communication with clients? Did you have help if you couldn't reach them yourself? Were deadlines extended? What if they couldn't be? Did anyone have a generator in place to make sure electricity didn't go out so they could keep working?
More importantly, for the future, what can you do? How will you prepare for next time?
This is a delayed response, but I'm glad you wrote about this. The hurricane shut me down for over a week--I'm at the Shore in NJ and didn't have power for six days. I think the national TV exposure helped because clients were genuinely concerned. Plus, I don't disappear, so to say, so my clients knew what was wrong. I had no issues, and I worked ahead to ensure I didn't miss deadlines.