My Work Day on Tuesday
This is in response to the question on Web Worker Daily: Where Is The Strangest Place You’ve Ever Worked? My answer: my car, parked near my house.
Tuesday was kind of an odd day. We have people in from out of town, I work at home, but we’re trying to sell our house. We had a broker’s open house early in the day. Since I knew that was going to be a couple of hours, I decided to go work at the local Starbucks. A Venti Soy Chai Tea Latte and a few hours later, I come back home for lunch.
Shortly after that, we get a call from a realtor saying they wanted to come bring a client over to our house. I had just got home and just started working, so it was a little annoying. Packed up the laptops and phones again and decided to camp out behind the house where the road “dead ends,” or used to anyway. I could see when people arrived and left, but be sufficiently out of sight. And I could easily access my WiFi, remaining connected.
Well that showing was a bust. The people didn’t show up, which of course I knew because I never saw anyone drive up. I also checked the home voicemail to see if I got any calls. No dice. Called the realtor, got the reason for not coming. Wife, kids and guests come in, I get a call from a different realtor, this one is actually in the neighborhood showing houses to a couple. Get everyone out of the house *again, *back up to the street in the car.
What was I able to accomplish from my car? Quite a lot, actually. I was able to do the things I needed to do that day, which involved email and publishing knowledge base articles. The car I had, a Toyota Matrix, had both a cigarette lighter adapter, which charged my Nokia N95, and a 110V plug, which I kept my laptop plugged into. As long as I had the car on, both things were able to charge. I alternated between leaving the car on and off, depending on how warm I was.
That was, perhaps, one of the weirdest days I’ve had working from home. It’s something I plan on being prepared to do, at least for the next few weeks until we move into our new place.
