We've secretly replaced your coffee...

Most days I work out of my home office near Philadelphia on a 5 year old Windows 2000 machine. Most of what we do at Junction Networks is virtual. We use Salesforce.com for lead tracking and trouble tickets and Google for document sharing and e-mail. I tried an experiment this week to see how virtual I could be and see if anyone would notice.

I bought a new MacBook Air. My first Mac. I have to say I LOVE IT. Buy Apple stock now. I copied over usersnames/passwords and bookmarks from my Windows box to my new Firefox install on the Mac and left town. I drove 600+ away on a 'working vacation' in Indianapolis (where I grew up and my family still resides) so my kids could hang out with their cousins for a week. I only brought with me my Mac and my Polycom VOIP phone. I wondered if anyone would notice. I didn't tell anyone what I was up to.

First problem: SSH. We use SSH to log into our servers and I didn't have my key on my Mac. I created a new key and e-mailed it to John and asked him to upload it to my .ssh directory so I could log in. I thought my cover was going to be blown right there. But I explained it as 'away from the PC' and trying to log in with the MAC. John got me hooked up and I was logged into our servers. Phew. Over the first hurdle.

Plugged the Polycom phone into the DSL line and it came right up. My username and extensions all 100% intact. I called ext. 7008 to talk to Tim in Chicago and it worked perfectly. The MacBook Air effortlessly connected to the WiFi connection and e-mail was up and running.

I have to say the week went well. I was 100% on the Mac except for one instance where I needed to manipulate an Excel file with some serious string concat functions that aren't in Google docs yet. Other than that, eight hours a day on the MacBook keyboard (including this not-short post) and there were no issues. It is an amazingly comfortable keyboard and easy to touch type on. It didn't crash once and Firefox was lightning fast even with all the tabs open.

I think I made it. No customers or other employees know I'm not in Philadelphia. I was 100% effective here being able to access servers, customer records, e-mail and documents without issue and with the phone, I was accessible via my extension and was logged into both the sales and support phone queue the entire week.

Tomorrow, on the weekly conf. call on Friday, I'll spring it on everyone that I'm 12 hours away from our NYC office, not 1 hour as they assumed. I'm actually pretty shocked that it turned out this well, but I'm sure for our engineering team it will be a case of, 'yeah, we planned it that way.' Which, of course, they did.

I'm not sure how many people can do this in their day job, but I'm happy that I can. I can 'secretly replace' the 'near' me with a 'far away' me and no one notices. Pretty cool.

Now I need to go on vacation where I leave all this stuff at home...