We don’t need no stinking offices?

I’m sitting out on the patio of a hotel at 11:30 on a Friday night. With a proper libation by my side, I’m looking forward to my daughter’s labor day soccer tournament that starts awfully early for the Saturday morning of the last weekend of summer. As I sit here listening to the crickets block out the traffic as the last stragglers of team parents head off to bed, I am struck by the fact of where my office was today, or should I say, where it wasn’t. I didn’t actually work from an official office today.

I worked from an office yesterday and had planned to today, but they are moving people around in the new office and no one was supposed to come in. Between that and a lot of the office taking the day off it meant I had to work remotely. Normally working remotely for me means the home office where I have a full time VPN into work going with multiple monitors and a sweet setup that makes it easy to get as much done as needed. That wasn’t going to be in the plans today.

I started off at the hotel where I turned on my 4g MiFi device and was surfing the web at great speeds. Hit the manual VPN and I was getting work done at the office while at least two of my family were still asleep. A short break for breakfast with the family led us downstairs where there was free WiFi flowing in the lobby and the food cart right next door. That made the first conference call and WebEx of the day a piece of cake. Then back to the hotel room while the family went site seeing and shopping. The MiFi kept the speeds going even in downtown Boston with nary a problem in sight. The setup worked perfectly for another vendor GoTo meeting and then a slightly longer lunch with the family.

Who am I kidding, the kids had been dying to do a duck tour so we headed out for a great hour with Professor Quackenstein on the Fenway Fanny. Interestingly enough, the HSPA+ on my phones (yes I am carrying two phones, as always, one for testing) worked flawlessly during the trip and yes I did manage to sneak a few minutes in with them.

After that it was off to Toscanini’s ice cream in Central Square in Cambridge. This is a Starbucks styled ice cream shop that had been that way long before Starbucks was a glimmer in anyone’s eye. It has a few couches, a bunch of tables and generous plugs at many of the tables – including the big central work slab. Could be the proximity to MIT or just the fact that they have always treated their customers well. I settled into a nice seat with a scoop of French Vanilla (they were out of my favorite, Malted Vanilla, to die for, really!) and connected to the free WiFi and was back in an IM chat and then another meeting. I have resolved that I must spend a whole afternoon doing this the next time I am in town, just too great a place to work, maybe even get a few buds to join me, and it’s only a short walk from the office… I spent 2 hours there while the family walked around Cambridge and MIT.

Alas, it was getting late so I met the family and we headed out to the hotel we are staying at for the weekend tournament, did a few more things on the laptop using the MiFi while traveling at 65mph before I switched over to the iPad and activated the VPN on there.

Nothing better than having a console designed in HTML 5 rather than flash to get work done on the move. No RDP required but great productivity.

The point I am trying to make here, besides getting you all a little hungry for some terrific ice cream, is to really show that the office isn’t a place where you go to do work, your office can be wherever you happen to be that you feel it’s time to get work done. Attending a meeting, participating in a collaboration session, talking to people over IM, just being productive, doesn’t depend on a desktop and a cube, but rather is what happens when you’ve been mobile enabled and given the tools to be productive whenever and wherever you are. In my case, it meant a good 10 hours of work time, and the chance to enjoy some ice cream at the same time.