The Steussy Ranch

Things have changed a lot in my worklife over the last five or ten years. I imagine there are still a lot of people who go into an office every day, have meetings, go to lunch and commute to work. I haven’t done any of those things for awhile.

In 2002, I moved from my office on Wilshire Boulevard into the second floor of my house in Los Angeles. While I was very apprehensive at the time, I intellectually knew that it shouldn’t make a difference in my work. And it didn’t. In fact, the biggest change was no longer being interrupted by people coming through trying to sell services that I didn’t need or county inspectors looking for the proper licenses and posters on our walls.

At the time, three employees shifted their work to extra rooms on the second floor with me. Within a year, it was only one employee with all of the others telecommuting. Within another six months, the last employee went to telecommuting status.

My current companies (Apogee Communications and Solon Enterprises) were formed in late 2003 and have always been home-base and internet-connected. But even then, there has been a slow shift to a new way of doing business. Granted, the vast majority of what I do is translation work, which means lots of international connections and strange hours at least one day every week for most of the year. But I think some of this is more general to knowledge workers everywhere.

Telephone. Value declining sharply, but still a serious tool. I just looked. I have received a grand total of eleven business calls in the last four months. Eleven. Ten years ago, that would be a slow day. Today, almost everything is handled by email. There are lots of people I deal with whom I have never spoken to. Indeed, in one case I thought the person I was working with for three years was a woman and only found out he was a man when I had to call about a complicated transaction a few weeks ago. Quite a surprise.

Most of my outgoing calls are through Vonage (domestic US and Canadian calls) or Skype (for secure calls anywhere and all international calls). Incoming calls are sorted through an internet service and delivered to my cellphone and desktop phone simultaneously. If the call goes to voicemail, the message is delivered in three separate places (email, website, and cellphone) to make sure I get it.

A lot of trouble, but each of those eleven calls I received were important. Otherwise, they would have just emailed me.

Total annual costs for these services: $960 for cellphones, $360 for tollfree number and sorting of incoming calls, $600 for two Vonage lines, $180 for a virtual fax line and absolutely nothing for Skype (except for about $20 a month in family calls to Hungary).

Working Hours. My busiest time is from 6:30am to about 10am in the morning. At those hours, Europe is available (and virtually all of my work has a European connection somewhere). I almost always take a mid-afternoon nap or do something much less serious in the early afternoon. Last summer, I was doing an in-house consulting job for a very large translation house in Los Angeles. Such torture, not to allow people to nap after lunch! And seriously, none of my eleven phone calls came in between noon and 3pm.

Work tends to come in late in the day, as text is finalized by the clients, so 3pm to 7pm is another high time for business.

Then there are the late nights. Keeping a competitive translation business means being fast and accurate, which means lining up European translators and reviewers after midnight. This happens at least once a week, and during the high season it can be every night of the week. Asian translators are easier; not only are their normal working hours closer to mine in California, but they are more apt to work odd hours to keep me happy than their European counterparts. Part of their business culture …

Friday afternoons and Saturdays are almost always free of work, but it is never a certainty. Sundays, more often than not, require at least some work. There are no true vacations–I have to always be connected, even if I have someone who can handle day-to-day queries.

Servers. After lots of trouble with rented servers over the years (surly, slow, reluctant tech support; unsecured servers which got hacked), I have found a new surprise in life. The personal, in-office server. I love my little Ubuntu box sitting in the corner of my office. It handles email, backups, blogs, webcam and everything else I throw at it with nary a problem. It is housed in a separate public IP address, with its own physical firewall to keep it away from the rest of the office and home computers. And it is completely at my control.

Since moving out of a physical office in 2002, it is only this year that I feel free to be completely location-independent. The keys are a robust cellphone with email capacity, a network of public and private servers for primary and backup communication options, and my Mac PowerBook Pro running two virtual Windows machines (Windows XP in Parallels and Windows Vista in Apple Bootcamp for serious applications). Everything can travel with me now – projects, accounting and ten years of email records.

I don’t think I would have ever imagined this ten years ago, or even five years ago. In the near future, I can easily see dropping my tollfree number and virtual fax line, while beefing up my in-house servers and the flurry of internet-based connections that they can support. It is a completely new and very rich way of doing business.