Attempting to work on my laptop at my parents home with my two nieces around./caption
I telecommute to my job at The Stream. I couldnt work there otherwise since our headquarters is in Dallas and I live in Phoenix. Probably the best thing about telecommuting is not having a real commute to work.
I save a couple of hours a day of time time that I can spend doing personal things instead. Another advantage is I dont have to put on a professional work outfit. I can lounge around in shorts and a T-shirt. Its really been quite a blessing the last four-plus years.
But what about the negatives? There are some things that can really drive me crazy. The first one is technical problems. I am all on my own. If the internet stops working no one can fix it but me. And it goes down periodically. I used to do tech support for a living so its probably not as hard on me as it would be on some people but its still a pain. Reboot my computer modem and router. If that doesnt work call tech support.
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Sometimes my modem or router has gone bad and then Im stuck driving to Frys Electronics to buy a new one. One time it turned out to be a tiny power button on the router that I needed to turn on (Id never turned it off). All this time takes away from my productivity.
If I were located on site at work someone from the IT department would have resolved my issue in minutes. It can get incredibly frustrating when Im working on a time-sensitive article. One time I finally gave up for awhile and went to Starbucks to use their internet.
The Printer From Hell
Then theres my printer. I have the worst luck with it. It came with excellent reviews so it should be pretty good. But it has this frustrating problem where it wont recognize a document when I send it to print for awhile. Sometimes it takes minutes to receive the document. Sometimes hours. It got incredibly frustrating when I was doing a weekly video series for The Stream on fake news. Id research the subject and write up an outline in the morning then print it out before my show started at 1 p.m.
Ive come to the conclusion there is a gremlin in my printer.
But with the temperamental printer I never knew if the document was going to print in time. Several times I just handwrote my outline out as fast as I could at the last minute. Ive spent hours researching the problem online to no avail. Ive come to the conclusion there is a gremlin in my printer. Money is tight due to some unfortunate things that happened to me in my past so Ive had to put off buying another printer.
A New Problem
It gave me a new problem last week that took awhile to solve. The paper got stuck feeding into it. I tried to pull it out but could not get a grasp on it and it was firmly stuck in there. But I needed to fix the problem that day because I had something I needed to print out for the next morning. I do early morning radio interviews occasionally which can be quite early for me since I am currently in a time zone three hours behind the East coast. I like to print out my articles before the interviews because the radio hosts inevitably asked me detailed questions about my articles. Im too groggy that early in the morning to attempt to use my laptop and scroll through it hurriedly find answers. Finally I turned the printer over and pulled the paper cartridge out as far as it would go and that solved it. I could get at the paper and pull it out. But not until half an hour had gone by.
If Id been in a work environment there would have been a suitable backup computer for me to use.
And then theres my laptop. I requested a MacBook Pro from work since I figured it would give me fewer technical problems than a PC. While this has proven true it still has occasional issues. One time it stopped taking a charge. I took it to a Mac repair store but they said it could take a few days to diagnose and fix.
I dont have a back up computer. My PCs are so old they really dont work anymore. They freeze up constantly and run very slow. I was stuck trying to use one of the old PCs while I waited for the repair. Needless to say my productivity tanked. Whereas if Id been in a work environment there would have been a suitable backup computer for me to use.