Working from home? How about the cafè?
Being self-employed, and in the fortunate position of being able to work from home quite a lot, I have often considered what other opportunities there are for working outside of the office. Working from home is fine especially if you have a dedicated office space (which for me is the loft). But what if you don’t have somewhere away from the other tenants of the house, or there are times when you just need to get out? Getting out can be important for home workers that don’t want to go out of their minds.
Also bear in mind when reading this that I have three children, two of which are under full-time school age. I can sympathise with anyone that struggles to find a working space even though I do have my own office in the house.
So bearing this in mind I went off to meet up with an associate yesterday and took my Mac along with me. He’d requested that we meet in Caffè Nero which immediately gave me the opportunity to turn up early and try a bit of cafè working. Hey, it’s what all the cool kids are doing these days…
…or that’s what the adverts would have me believe. To be honest I was actually quite excited about it. I could just see myself sitting outside a cafè sipping espresso and cutting some mean code. Very Parisian.
Anyhow, I get there, get a coffee, sit down in a comfy chair, switch on the Mac (obviously having fully charged it before leaving) and launch Firefox…and that’s about as far as I got before it started asking for my credit card details. I should have seen it coming I suppose. I’m not a particularly naive person but I thought they started offering this sort of roaming access to tempt people in rather than to directly make money from it. Access from £10? Seems a lot for 20 minutes on the internet. So, I tried the network of the coffee house over the road; no luck. By this time I was desperate to get something going so I even tried a couple of office networks in the vicinity 
I looked about to see if anyone else was perhaps on-line and it confirmed my suspicion that it isn’t proving very popular. Maybe the take up is higher in the Big Smoke, but in Harrogate it doesn’t seem to be taking off. I checked out Starbucks when I got home and that looks like a similar affair. They appear to have teamed up with T-Mobile. For a simple person like myself who already has a home phone contract, a mobile phone contract and a broadband contract it’s just too much for another similar service I would rarely use. I don’t know about you but my monthly bank statement is already a collection of subscriptions for a variety of things I believe I can’t do without. One day I must sort that out…
Before this I had dreams of blogging from a series of cafès, all the while working my way through the ever expanding selection of coffees on offer. Oh well. Practically speaking I don’t think the cafè is a viable option when it comes to working outside the office anyway. For a start I don’t think I’d survive the caffeine overload, but more seriously it’s just too much hassle for me to get that much done. Altogether it doesn’t help much in my aim to be a better father and husband since I’d spend more time out of the house for no benefit to anyone other than myself (it would purely be a personal indulgence).
Popularity: 17% [?]