Telecommuting From Key West

January 5, 2008 · Filed Under WFH, telecommuting · 1 Comment

If you’ve read my blog in the past, you know that I often speak of the benefits of living wherever you wish (within reason) as a Telecommuter. I spent the Christmas Holiday in Key West, Florida and not a day went by where my wife and I didn’t think about “what if we moved”. Going from 32 degrees to 80 is enough to make anyone start thinking.

There are many reasons why it would be a good move for us. As an avid fisherman, the though of being able to fish year round is very compelling. Most of my wife’s family and my family live in Florida and we are the sole holdouts still living in the Northeast. My job could easily be done from a home in Florida, though my wife would need to start over fresh. That is not a problem, however, as I make enough money to cover us both and it would enable us to start a business of our own with my wife putting in the initial effort full time.

So why don’t we pick up an move? Three things stand in our way: inertia, Pennyscroft, and the Chesapeake Bay

Inertia - as explained by Wikipedia, inertia “is a non-quantifiable property of matter by which it remains at rest or in uniform motion in the same straight line unless acted upon by some external force”. That external force would need to be a lost job, financial hardship, health issues or something else drastic.
Pennyscroft - this is the name given to my current home in Pennsylvania by it’s original owner, Spencer Trotter. The home was built in 1886/1887 and having moved here 2.5 years ago, the house has become a part of our family. It is hard to leave it before we finish what our vision is for the house.
Chesapeake Bay - I’ve recreated on the Chesapeake for 35 years or so and I believe it to be one of the most amazing and beautiful bodies of water in the world. The wildlife and scenery are unsurpassed and I find it hard to leave it behind. Given the repeated dreary reports on the state of the Bay’s health, I sometimes think all is lost and that I should move away in disgust.

My wife would probably also add her job of 15 years with the same company as a hindrance to moving. Dupont is a great company to work for and it is not likely that she could continue to work for them if we were to relocate.

So there you have it. Although the telecommuting arrangement allows flexibility in one’s life, we often have many reason why not to take advantage of all that it allows us to do. Someday …

Tags: Chesapeake Bay, Key West

Find Out if You and Your Current Job are Suitable for Telework

December 19, 2007 · Filed Under WFH, telecommuting · Comment

Want an objective opinion on whether you and your job are good candidates for a telework arrangement?

All it takes is 3 minutes to use the Telework Exchange Online Eligibility Gizmo and it will assess and report back to you on your eligibility. It will also aid you in producing a report to present to your manager to help “sell” yourself into a teleworking arrangement.

This is primarily a government-oriented site, but it was interesting to find out my telecommuting cost savings and pollution savings per year working from home:

Commuting Costs

$6,075 - Total amount spent commuting to and from work in a year
10200 - Number of pounds of pollutants dispersed by your car in a year
5.1 - Number of tons of pollutants dispersed by your car in a year

What is Telework Exchange? In their own words:

“Telework Exchange^SM is a public-private partnership focused on demonstrating the tangible value of telework and serving the emerging educational and communication requirements of the Federal teleworker community. The organization facilitates communication among Federal teleworkers, telework managers, and IT professionals.”

Tags: telework

What is Your Reason for Wanting to Work from Home?

December 12, 2007 · Filed Under WFH, telecommuting · 2 Comments

I wanted to share the results of this poll that is being run on WorkAtHomeArticles.net regarding the top reasons why people want to work from home. When you get a chance, stop by and participate in the voting yourself. So far, the voting results are what you see above and I thought I’d provide some personal dissection of each of these choices:

“I want financial freedom”
Personally, I don’t associate working from home with a direct path to financial freedom. I equate the lottery with financial freedom. If you did another survey of people who already worked from home asking them if they had reached the promised land of “financial freedom” or not, I would bet that the ratio would be lopsided to the latter. Simply making the switch to work from home won’t assure financial freedom. Maybe this survey choice is better associated with wanting to work for one’s self. “Self-employed people make up less than 20 percent of the workers in America but account for two-thirds of the millionaires” according to the Millionaire Next Door. Most people who work from home actually work for others.

“I hate getting up early”
I can relate to this reason, but I’m surprised it ranked so high. I personally like to work late and get up late, starting around 8:30 or 9:00 with my workday.

“I need to earn extra money to make ends meet”
I’m assuming they’re surveying people who want to take their full-time job and convert it or replace it with one that is 100% working from home. I’m also assuming that the average work from home job earns as much as one that is office-based or potentially less. With that said, I don’t see where there is an opportunity to earn extra money working from home. If you have a day job, whether you work in an office or at home, you should be focusing 100% on that job. The extra money options start at night and on the weekends. You can do that without a WFH career.

“I want more time with my family”
Makes sense - no qualms there. My wife loses about 70 minutes a day with Lizzie and I (maybe that helps with sanity?)

“I want a flexible schedule”
Working from home certainly can provide flexibility in one’s schedule. I think the give-and-take in the flexible hours is generally mutually beneficial between the employee and employer. I’ve always loved this comment about a previous employer of mine made by one of it’s previous employees:

“I spent 12 years at [Company X]. The whole “homeworking” idea was a sham. Largest part-time workforce I’ve ever seen. If I had a nickel for every conference call I was on where someone flushed the toilet, was standing over a putt or was about to finish that third martini on a Wednesday afternoon, I’d be retired!” He goes on to say, “My favorite was this guy knew who moved to Cabo to open a strip club and “work from home”..yeah..right…”

Personally, I think that it all comes out in the wash. It is normal for employees to be working crunch nights around-the-clock on a deadline, flying out Sunday so that they can meet a customer first thing Monday morning, or delaying a vacation due to a critical project.

“There are limited job opportunities where I live”
This is one of the top reasons that Telecommuting is a wonderful arrangement. Another variation of this reason is that “There are unlimited places where I can live“. I like knowing that I can pack up the house and relocate seven states away if I wish to, and still keep the same job.

“I hate my boss/co-workers”
I think this line of reasoning has more to do with wishful thinking. If you hate your boss and co-workers then you should be quitting. Working from home won’t solve that problem. Working with them remotely only means that you don’t need to look at them.

“I’m basically a lazy person and dislike being told what to do”
Working from home certainly will reduce the ability for management to provide constant oversight, but if you’re lazy, that condition will eventually hurt you wherever you are working. You need to win the lottery or inherit a lot of money to remedy that.

Tags:

SimplyHired Job Board

December 11, 2007 · Filed Under WFH, telecommuting · Comment

I’ve put up a job board on the site powered by SimplyHired and would like your feedback on the quality of the service that they provide.

The job board provides hiring managers the ability to post jobs for a fee of $5 and they will get priority display on this site. As a job seeker you can click on the “View all jobs” button to generate a free job search that will display only telecommuting jobs from around the nation. You also can bookmark the search so that you can conveniently check back in the future as new jobs are posted. That link is here.

I have run a few tests and it appears that all jobs displayed are indeed telecommute-flexible, so take it for a test spin if you are in the market.

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Telecommuting from Paradise - Not What I Had Planned

December 7, 2007 · Filed Under WFH, telecommuting · 4 Comments

Now for a sobering post about what happened to me this past June while I was sleeping at my home away from home. During the summers, my wife and I frequently go to the shore (in our case, the Chesapeake Bay) as many people do in my region. I often go down Thursday night and work from there on Fridays so that the fishing can commence swiftly after the workday. My wife will come down after work Friday but won’t get there until after it’s too late for me to dip the fishing lines in the water - thus, my Thursday arrivals. As I mentioned in my previous post, it doesn’t matter where you work when you have a work at home job as long as you have the basic necessities at your disposal.

This particular Thursday evening started as many do once I arrived after the 2 1/2 hour journey - with dinner - and I grilled lamb chops on the BBQ that night. I’ve been cooking for many years but I still haven’t found the trick to grilling lamb chops without grease-induced flames, so they became a bit charred (I need to use the indirect heat method next time). No, this wasn’t the source of the fire you see above, but it plays into the story…

I spent some time on the Internet that night, watched some television and went to bed around 10:30. I was unusually restless that night and left the room 3 times to get a drink of water in the kitchen - something I never do (once I’m in bed, I stay!). The first of those three times I smelled something funny - a smoky, burnt smell, but I assumed it was the remnants of the BBQ’d lamb that was then residing in the waste bin. I went back to sleep and I realized the next day I had been sleeping for hours as the fire started and grew.

I woke up two more times and during the third awakening at 5:00 AM I decided that the charred smell wasn’t BBQ lamb - something was very wrong. I left the bedroom (located on the left side of the house below) and I looked out the glass doors in the center of the rear of the house and saw flames shooting out of the other side of the house. At this moment I encountered the first situation in my lifetime where I felt truly powerless and quickly decided to jettison myself from the house.

Being someone that wears corrective contact lenses, I was in a vulnerable position as I had no time to put them into my eyes so I was running blind to a degree. I threw on minimal clothes, no shoes, no lenses, no wallet, no keys, no cell phone, hit the ADT Security fire alarm button and left the house with the cordless phone in my hand while dialing 911. I had enough time to tell the emergency operator my street address, she blurted out the name of my city and the phone went dead (power line inside was burned through). I learned later that since she lost contact with me part way through the conversation, she put the call into the emergency crews as if I was trapped in the fire. Luckily at this point I was safe in the backyard, walking around with very poor vision in the dark - but safe.

Twenty-five mile per hour winds off the Bay were fanning the flames and expediting the spread of the fire, which started in the garage area and entered the attic, spreading across the breadth of the home. At this point my SUV - my immaculately maintained Porsche Cayenne that was parked in front of the garage and the boat parked beside it were absorbed by 40 foot flames. The remnants left over after the fire are below. It was as if a missile had hit them.

Within 25 minutes, the fire department was present and starting to take control of the fire. My neighbors quickly arrived and offered any assistance they could provide. In all, five fire departments arrived from as far away as 40 minutes. Within about two hours the fire was out and I could commence doing something productive like asking the fire department to retrieve any of a few key items: contact lenses, keys, wallet, shoes, cell phone, and oh yes, my work laptop. The laptop was scorched, melted and contorted, but fortunately the hard drive was magically intact.

I had backed up my work data a few days before and it was fortunately at the other house so I was safe either way. This fire is now why I use Mozy, which is a remote backup service over the Internet (safely encrypted). In the case of fire, your backups are offsite and not just sitting on top of the computer in an external device prone to the same disasters that your source computer is.

There’s much more to tell on the fire story relative to insurance claims (all stories are positive so far) and other recovery activities, but suffice to say this is the most eventful night of my life - and thankfully I still have one. In the end, they ruled it an electrical fire, possibly coming from a power screwdriver battery. Rebuild planning continues as I write this.