Friday, March 22, 2013

Pubs 'are becoming second office' | Orange UK

Pubs 'are becoming second office' | Orange UK:
"Pubs are increasingly being used as a second office, with people using them as a work base as well as having a drink, according to a new report. ..."
And you don't even have to travel to the UK to establish your office in comfortable surroundings.

Many may bemoan the idea that you are "at work" at times other than normal work hours, but once there were pagers infringing on our time outside work.  Now there is readily available email and web browsing as long as you have a network connection.  And network connections are becoming ubiquitous at eating and drinking establishments.

I was at a VMWare users group meeting in St. Louis a few months ago and when the fairly large crowd was asked how many used at least one mobile device to access work files, nearly all the participants raised their hands.  And nearly half the room admitted to having 2 or more mobile devices (i.e. smart phone, iPad, laptop, etc.)

So, for many of us professional geeks, the lines between work, social life, and home are becoming blurred. This doesn't mean we are 24/7 workers, but a couple weeks ago when we had two major snowstorms in the course of a week, the university at which I work closed for two days.  This was unprecedented  but we were able to log into our servers, do maintenance, and ensure total availability of the research clusters.

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