Homework Update

Well, that is a full week completed of working from home. I was in the office on Tuesday, supposedly for a conference call but that quickly got cancelled in all of the chaos, and spent my time building cardboard boxes (who says nobody is aware of my talents?).

During the week a couple of problems arose; firstly my ISP (Demon) had a rare network outage on their ADSL resulting in no connection. As I need to be permanently connected to the European HQ to keep the ProEngineer license running this meant I was unable to work. The worst thing was not having any internet access to check Demon's network status page for any issues and estimates of when they'd be resolved. So I now have Demon's free phone number for receiving network status messages saved on my mobile.

Secondly, receiving IT support from a BOFH is a bit of a problem when you're slaving away in a home office (a spare bedroom in my case) and the nearest company IT support is in Swindon. I couldn't connect to the VPN on the Friday morning but I managed to sort that myself.

Lessons to be learnt from these experiences:

1. I should set up a dial-up account (from an alternative ISP) on one of the machines using a modem for the times that the ISP may be down. Thankfully I have this from my domain hosting site but I haven't got around to setting it up yet.

2. Have all the relevant help and status line numbers at hand. Now safely programmed into my mobile.

Other than that my experience of home working has been positive. I plan to write further of my thoughts on this later. We will probably be settled into the new office by the middle of this week.

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