Geekfoolery

Mr. Alex has been traveling on business for the last two weeks, and there’s nothing like business travel to test the limits of one’s always-on wireless connectedness to the virtual office and online network of cow-orkers.

I had with me on my two week trip:

An IBM laptop (work).

A Mac laptop (personal).

A Sprint wireless broadband card for the laptop.

A 3G smartphone with Internet access, instant messaging, GMail, access to my work Exchange mail, GPS and Googlemaps.

An iPod shuffle.

With all that stuff, a rental car and a hotel room, I’m a freakin’ technomad road warrior. I barely need a change of clothes, I am a wired up whirlwind of productivity.

Here’s a quick rundown of what works and what doesn’t:

The Laptop: Once the sexy sports car of the business computing world, now the laptop is common work horse. You bring your laptop on a business trip to keep up with emails and to send out reports.

The Good: Even when out of the office, you can still keep up and avoid a mountain of unanswered emails and to-do tasks when you return.

The Bad: What’s the point of getting out of the office and taking a trip if half your time is spent answering emails? The alternative seems to be to spend time doing whatever it is you traveled for, then answer emails at night. Although that’s a challenge as well, especially if there’s a business dinner involved. In that case, figure getting to bed well past midnight just to keep your head above the Exchange sea-level.

The Ugly: Your go-getter host will then call an 8am meeting. And with a time-zone difference, you need to dial in toa conference bridge at 7am anyway.

Wireless Access, anywhere, anytime:

The Good: No more running around trying to find an open WiFi connection at a local coffee shop. A Wireless card gives you decent Internet access anywhere you can get a cell signal, even in the car.
The Bad: Spotty signal coverage. No matter how many bars you’re showing, somehow, your hotel room, your conference room, your coffee shop, your car all seem to be in a Bermuda’s triangle of signal strength. If the damn thing would just fail outright, you could at least accept it and move on with your life. But no, it connects and loads the headers of the web forms you’re trying to load… and then …. you wait… until it times out.

The Ugly: Even worse than when your mobile Internet doesn’t work is when it does. Sure, your boss knows you’re out of town, but someone needs to attend this Webex session on the new finance guidelines for Q4, so you’ve now pulled the rental car off to the side of the road, and are juggling cell phone in one hand and laptop in the other while two  project managers obsess over the wording each headline of a 50-slide Powerpoint deck that no one pays attention to anyway.

The Smartphone

The Good: A cellphone that just makes phone calls is about as passé a watch that just tells time. Now you’ve got it all in the palm of your hand. You can call, IM, email, text, send picture and video messages, surf the web, find out where you are, take pictures and listen to music.

The Bad: Jack of all trades is usually master of none. Despite all the functions of my smartphone, I still carry gadgets that do most of the things my smartphone does as well. It’s nice to have all that capability with me with just one device, but it’s a supplementary function, not a replacement. I think of it a bit like camping. A tent and sleeping bag are shelter, but I wouldn’t want to live in them. My smartphone doesn’t replace my laptop.

The Ugly: They don’t call it an electronic leash for nothing. And it’s not just the boss or co-workers or clients who can figure out they’ve been sent to voicemail, either. One of the increasingly rare pleasures of air travel for me is turning the cell phone off.

The Hotel:

The Good: Not making the bed or cleaning the bathroom. A wake-up call. Room service (on the expense report, of course).

The Bad: Thumps and other noises from other guests. Mattresses and pillows that don’t quite “feel” right. Losing the inevitable expensive dongle for one of your gadgets.
The Ugly: $10 a day (or more!) for Internet access at some hotels. That works out to $300 a month! Geez!

A couple things that we need to make this whole business travel a little easier:
Standardized rechargers: Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, actually proposed this decades ago, and it still makes sense. Manufacturers should agree on a range of power needs for cell phones, laptops, and other devices and come up with maybe 4 or 5 standard sizes, like batteries have AAA, AA, C, and D. Replacement adapters could be purchased in the supermarket if you needed one. I think USB may eventually become a de facto default charger, but we need something more for laptops as well.

A little sanity at the airport: Here we are at the airport, taking off shoes and belts, pulling laptops out of bags, and then frantically trying to put it all back together on the other side. Other countries don’t put people through all this. It should be possible.

And finally, time. Travel is exhausting–a one-hour flight will take you about 3 hours when you factor in early arrival, late departure, and travel to and from the airport. Managing a trip and keeping up with work at home. Putting in extra hours after you get back to the hotel. Arrange travel so that your road warriors can come back to the office without having to spend a week catching up.

And none of those ideas will cost you dime in Skymall.

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