Where Is the Strangest Place You’ve Ever Worked?
No, I don’t mean the time you spent as a corn dog dipper at Hot Dog On A Stick. I’m talking about what you consider the weirdest place you’ve ever spent productive hours as a web worker.
When we think about web work, we often visualize an office (sometimes neat, sometimes not so much), or maybe a coffee shop or other third place where geeks congregate. But there are so many other places to work — hospital waiting rooms, hot air balloons, hangars, hilltops — and those are just the places that begin with the letter “H”.
So how far out can you work? How far out should you work?
You forgot hang-glider…
I’ve worked at a MINI dealership while waiting for my car to be serviced, parks (looking for wi-fi while travelling) and at a few swimming pools during my kids’ swim practice (all with free wifi).
I did find wifi at Children’s Hospital Seattle, but I used it for emailing updates, not working.
Not exactly wierd or work but when I was on holiday last year I uploaded tons of unresized photos to flickr using what I thought was the hotels free wireless access. It turned out it was actually the unsecured access point in the house next door… hope they were not on a bandwidth cap.
It’s ironic that I actually just posted about this on my blog, thanks to a friend who tweeted his wife’s progress while she was giving birth (it’s a girl!) but my weirdest place was undoubtably after I gave birth to my son Liam last July and was providing online customer support for members of our online artists community from the postpartum recovery ward within hours of giving birth. So much for maternity leave, eh? Of course, as a web worker, I didn’t actually “need” one since I was still able to take care of my new son and toddler while working from home. And since we’re a three-person start-up, it’s not like I could realistically take any substanative time off.
Perhaps this goes back to this week’s earlier post about web working and “vacations.” Something tells me I’m overdue!
When I arrived for an on-site job once, I asked to be shown my office, and a new secretary asked me to describe the job I was hired for. She then showed me down a long hall, through a 3/4th-height door, and into a large closet. I was stooped over, looking around, confused. Around the back corner of the closet, there was a tiny desk, every square inch of which was used up by a huge desktop behemoth from 6-7 years previous. I was completely stunned and actually hit my head on some object while I sat down and started up the computer..
The secretary returned an hour later with my job contact, who was laughing very hard, completely embarrassed. He then showed my to my real office, which was quite a bit nicer. :-)
I don’t know if I count as a ‘webworker’. I’m a mother who does a lot of work in the community that requires a computer.
I keep a printer and a scanner in my MommyMobile (minivan) trunk. I carry my office in my backpack.
For the past two years as our school’s PTA president, I’ve had access to the school’s boiler room, because it has a closet in the back that the PTA uses.
I’ve taken to bringing a stroller with a sleeping toddler in the seat, scanner and printer in the stroller pocket, into the boiler room. I sit cross-legged on the floor near a power outlet, with my laptop. My LiDE scanner just uses a USB cable, no power cable is needed.
I’m able to fax things via the scanner and e-Fax. I can make quiet calls on the cell phone, as long as it’s between boiler cycles.
The school has WiFi, and most of the other parents (and even many of the teachers) don’t have badge-access to the boiler room. It’s a bit dirty on the floor, but it’s a quiet place on campus with WiFi and a door!
I can show up early for picking up the kids, snag the good parking space, walk around the block to put the toddler to sleep, and get a good hour of working in privacy before school lets out!
We provide race timing services so we get to go to some pretty interesting places. When on site, we work out of a converted Sprinter van, complete with a refrigerator and microwave. We’ve been on everything from mountain passes to beaches. My favorite is a bike race that finishes at Teton Village outside of Jackson Wyoming. The scenery is just spectacular. And most memorable was sitting cross legged on the ground about 10 feet away from a huge bull buffalo with only a barb wire fence in between. I wondered the whole time I was there, if that fence would really stop him if he wanted to take a close look at what I was doing.
officially? at the bank that currently employs me, i started as a contractor. the floor was full. i was given a 1/2 round end-cap table (like would go back to back between two cubes) right next to the freight elevator. oh, the joys of cigarette and diesel exhaust coming up from the loading dock. bonus: i was the first to know when the office supplies arrived!
ad-hoc? starbucks, tullys, the bus, the train. sitting in a rental car in a parking garage while my wife is on a job interview (in addition to web dev on that trip, i also studied microeconomics – fun!)
Wierd places I have worked: I regularly do web work with a cellular laptop card on a commuter bus (and have done more than one conf call that way with a cell phone + cell enabled laptop); over Wifi from a basement level meeting room during a conference; and from the side of a river road in my car (laptop + cell on a conf call). The idea that I can telecommute from bed at least once a week is pretty amazing in and of itself. I think the new mom telecommuting within hours of birth is the winner here (and pretty darned amazing)!
I started building my web solutions firm when my wife was in grad school, so my day job at the time was transporting RV’s all over the country from manufacturer to dealer lots. I was using a iBook G4 and a USB cable to dialup via my Samsung Sprint phone. Not super quick, but great for emails and moderate surfing. I’d get a text alert that a client needed help, and then find the nearest place to pull over with a strong digital signal. I think my favorite place I pulled over to work for an hour or so was on the side of mountain road in Utah…definitely very peaceful and serene :-)
For 7 years my home office was in the cobbled rock basement of our house that was built in 1887. It was just like working in a dungeon with spiders as cell-mates and dust, dust, dust. In the summertime, it was always a comfy 70-ish degrees while it was 90+ outside! But in the winter it was a pretty steady 50ish degrees and that was a little chilly. My house was older than our state (Montana), but I had high speed DSL!
I did some pro-bono work for a large medical facility and my first office was in a computer lab, a floor below where they did autopsies. While I never saw them, there were stories of colored liquids running down the walls. From there I was moved literally under the loading dock for the building. It was okay, except for the banging of dumpsters from time to time.
After a flight home from the client site, I hopped in my cab for the hour drive in grid lock, and whipped out my PC, and cell-phone, via Bluetooth EVDO I was able to catch up on the e-mail that came through during my flight, and worked for the entire drive home.
I’ve worked in internet cafes in several different countries (Morocco is probably the most exotic), including one in Switzerland where I had to keep feeding actual coins into a device on the computer to keep going (this was only two years ago too). Needless to say, that kept me on task!
My history of working anywhere predates the Web! In 1990, I completed the final essay exam for a graduate course in psychological assessment in a hotel room in Southern California the morning after a Dead show. I had to finish the test and drop it in the mailbox before noon so it could be postmarked. It was 6am, soon after sunrise. Two of my friends were sleeping next to me in the king-sized bed. Two crashers were getting it on under a blanket on the floor. Several other people were in various stages of consciousness around the room. I got an A!
The first thing that comes to mind is working with my laptop in pouring rain under a small canopy of an ATM. Using free WiFi of WTC Helsinki.
[...] weiss gar nicht, wie ich das jetzt gefunden habe. Ich glaube via dem hier. Wie auch immer, es gibt da einen witzigen Fotostream, für den alle möglichen Web Worker ihren [...]
[...] 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 [...]
[...] firmly convinced that you can work anywhere: rural, urban, on a plane, in a coffeeshop, and in many stranger places. But is everyone else out there as convinced as we are? WWD reader Conrad Buck writes to ask [...]