Mary Panttaja

(Well, it’s not really a competition. It’s really about joint and parallel evolution.)

I read the San Francisco Chronicle article on mobile workers—by their examples, young, hip, technology workers living and working in the coffee shops of San Francisco. It’s fun to see where it is going, but it’s fabulous to realize this kind of independence in your work.

I started tele-commuting in the mid-80’s when it was very slow over a phone line. I could just edit source files with vi, compile, and run—lucky when I got through a full sequence before getting into garble-trouble.

But having been a part of this movement for over 20 years it’s good to see it is alive, well, and continuing to evolve. The ability to work anywhere is another part of the new freedom that technology is providing. (In addition to last week’s discussion about “small is powerful.”)

My earliest incarnation of telecommuting included a early model IBM PC and a 1200 baud modem (and later an early Sun workstation over the same modem.) I lived in the Santa Cruz mountains and had two school-age children. I managed to go into the office of my client in Saratoga about once a week. And, almost every day until they were both in junior high school, I was home when the kids got home from school. Of course, over the decades the tools, techniques, and what you could accomplish have grown immensely.

Today, my husband and I travel in a car which has a cellular modem and a wireless network, or we use our portable Verizon wireless network card with a router. We can have network anywhere we have battery power or electricity. We travel with two Macs. When we are driving at least one of us can be working—as needed.

Our pop-up tent camper also has solar panels for electricity—our goal being to work absolutely anywhere. (The solar panels were a response to our experiences camping offline (without power) in late October in the Rockies—a single battery couldn’t keep even the fan for the propane heater running long enough—fortunately, we sleep fine in our artic bags at 29 degrees.)

We live in the country and our version of “going to Starbucks” is to move outdoors where the wireless network reaches most places. The challenge, as always, is power, and I actually had to run wires to the most suitable work sites. As a writer I am inspired to do whatever it is that keeps me writing. And I’ve discovered (and I’m somewhat embarrassed by this) is that I can almost always write if I find the comfortable spot. Often a reclining chair in the sun or shade (depending on the temperature), or sprawled on a sofa. Not very pretty, but I figure—whatever works.

Now our goal is to continue to expand our independence of place—and for many things independence in time. Maybe technology can allow us to arrange our work around our lives instead of trying to squeeze our lives in around our work. It’s a scramble, but in working at home I am able to keep the vegetable garden going, prepare more humane meals, spend my time in the spot that I’ve chosen to live—these are all worthwhile goals for everyone.

In addition, we want to travel more, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to work. We just want to take our lives with us wherever we want to be. Mix it up.

So it’s fun to imagine (and if you can imagine it, you can probably make it happen) what our lives can look like now that so much of the support we need for many jobs is both ubiquitous and mobile.

We’ll be hitting the road now any time. See you out there.