Right at the end of 2019 I announced that in early 2020 I was temporarily relocating to Tokyo, Japan, for a six month work assignment. It’s now March, and I’m still in Colorado. So what’s up with that Tokyo assignment, anyway? Since I’ve had several folks ask, I figured it’s probably best to post something here.

First, based on all the information available to me, it looks like Tokyo is still going to happen. It will just be delayed a bit—although the exact extent of the delay is still unclear.

Why the delays? A few things have affected the timing:

1. As part of an acquisition at work, some new folks got involved that hadn’t been previously involved, and it took them some time to understand what this assignment was all about. This is totally understandable, but we hadn’t accounted for the extra time to bring the new stakeholders up to speed.
2. The finance folks got involved and made everyone do some necessary legwork that hadn’t previously been done in properly allocating costs to the appropriate budgets. So, that took some time.
3. Finally, there’s this virus thing going around…

It looks like #1 and #2 have been sorted, but it’ll still be (at least) another 4-6 weeks due to work visa paperwork and such. We’re hopeful that the remaining time will allow #3 to (mostly) resolve itself, but that’s a real wildcard. No one really knows for sure what will happen, or how it will affect things.

That’s the latest (as of right now). If things change drastically, I’ll post another update here on the site. For now, though, it’s still going to happen, and I’m still studying my Japanese. Feel free to hit me on Twitter if you have something to say or share!