Is it possible to work with nothing but a laptop and modem?
Original article date: October 1999
I have decamped to ‘down under’ for a while, and I’m therefore conducting a big teleworking experiment. Is it possible to work with nothing but a laptop and modem for contact with the world? I intend to find out.
The two quite separate challenges of being 12,000 miles from the UK office and being nine hours ahead actually work together well. Because the working days hardly overlap, no document need be jointly in demand at both sites. So after the day ends in UK, key changed files are automatically emailed to Oz, and vice-versa. Without the time difference, simultaneous shared file access would be far more of a problem!
To avoid file date confusion, you’re better off leaving your computer set to UK time. One thing you cannot manage without is a good reliable email connection. If you have a corporate email setup, before going away, get to know the computer services department well. If you have a personal dial-up account, make sure you know how it all works. Accept that you’ll spend about an hour a day simply dealing with the fact that email is now your main means of communication.
Ensure you have a second means of communication for fixing problems – such as the facility to send and receive faxes without you or the customer having to make an international call. It’s all possible these days. Your attitude to using the internet does tend to reflect the way it is priced (unless your company is perpetually linked to it). In the UK, using a ‘free’ internet provider, you pay about 1p per minute cheap rate for the local calls. If you want to minimise the money you spend, you keep the calls short. You use an email program that hangs up after sending and receiving, and you avoid using a “web based” mail provider, as that would mean paying to read and write messages. In Australia, however, local calls are a fixed cost regardless of length, and most internet providers charge a fixed price per month, so if you want to check email twice, an hour apart, the cheapest way is to remain on the internet for the whole hour. And since unused connections tend to be switched off after 10 minutes, you have to find a website that will generate continuous traffic, then stay connected to it in the background while you work for that hour. Enter Internet radio! Try wwwspikeradio.com if you’re young and trendy enough, or http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/on_air/default.htm if you like Radio 5 Live.
The best ways to deal with supplier info when teleworking from afar are CD-Roms and company website. I’ve had opportunity to put a few through their paces of late. This is what I have found.
Firstly, a gripe about websites generally. I have found all of these:
- Web sites with no ‘contact details’
- Web sites which are so flashily ‘advanced’ that not only can I not view them, but I can’t get to the ‘contact details’ page, to email or fax them instead
- Web sites where every page starts with a huge picture …of some text. Needless pictures are a pain on a website at the best of times, but pictures of text? Please!
- Web sites which give a contact email address which is then only checked once per week
- UK companies wishing to trade worldwide who turn off their fax outside UK business hours (good grief!)
Anyway, the site I have revisited most is the Allen-Bradley (Rockwell Automation) site, which happily is not guilty of any of the above. I’ve needed to read a lot of manuals, and these can be downloaded in PDF form from their online library. They are excellent manuals, and once you have the manual you want, you really are sorted. But even they (and anyone else offering an online library) should look at it from the visitor’s point of view and cross-reference the site. I’ll explain how next month.
October 1999