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Buddy, Can You Spare a Desk?

October 30th, 2008 (10:00am) Pamela Poole 7 Comments

The triplets are due any moment now, and that means so is your mother-in-law. Or your precious baby girl has just graduated from college and has no more of a clue than she did the day she started, so she wants to come home for “a while.” Or maybe you’re moving back in with mom and dad yourself…

You can kiss your home office good-bye (hopefully temporarily). So now what?

There may be co-working spaces near you, but they’re not quite as ubiquitous as Starbucks yet… You can dig (and dig and dig) through craigslist and hope it’s your lucky day and that your dream workspace will appear in the first 10 listings (because looking at any more than that is mind numbing and hazardous to your health) and that the people with the perfect space for rent that miraculously appears in listing number seven actually respond to you when you do contact them. (I have a very low tolerance for classifieds sites, can you tell?)

You can go to Regus, the slick, corporate rent-a-workspace/meeting room/virtual office people, and deal with “a representative” who will probably try to sell you a plan or a package or something. (That’s just the impression I get from looking at their site and knowing how American businesses operate… I could be wrong.)

Or… You can check out ShareYourOffice.com, a new project with a whole lot of potential. It’s a free service for people who need office space, or those who have extra space they’d like to fill with a warm, rent-paying body.

Wait! Before you say, “Not interested” and stop reading, think of this: it’s a French startup. Parisian. Which means most of the office spaces (at the moment) are in Paris. Ever dreamed of living and working in France?

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