Telecommuting

I just read an article which talked about benefits of telecommuting - for the telecommuter...but not for the ones left behind.

I can't agree with this more. I have been telecommuting for nearly 2 years now, twice per day - and I can totally see the benefits. Many of the others in the office are also starting to telecommute (I am proud to say I was among the first in our office to do it, though!)

At first, I was afraid that it would be *me* who ended up being "left out" - but once more and more of us have been working at home, it has not been as bad as at first imagined.

One thing that is vital to being able to successfully telecommute is having everyone available at all reasonable times via some kind of instant messenger. This includes those who are in the office as well as out of the office. I can't count the number of times that I needed to get a hold of someone, and they weren't online. Email is just too slow!

Another thing is a reliable VPN connection and a fast Internet connection at home. On my mac, I have found that the best thing to do is to set up some ssh tunnels...and I have written a couple of scripts to automate that process. One day, when I'm feeling particularly ambitious, I might build it into a "real" application instead of a bunch of shell scripts. I have just found that the Cisco VPN doesn't quite work as advertised...and it messes up a bunch of other things when your network connection gets dropped. In the spirit of the "Mac way" of doing things, I expect things to "just work".