Officially becoming a Digital Nomad

This week was my last in the office. I now have no office, no cube, nothing! Due to an error, some might say a serious error, ARM failed to move into it's new premises this summer. The landlord of one of our existing buildings seized his chance and tried to double the rent on that building until we were able to move into our new building. ARM's response was to try and cram everyone into the one old building and close the other office that was now on double rent. Needless to say not everyone fitted and I received an email a couple of weeks ago that went something like....

Dear Sales,

You have already been told by ...[the head salesman] that will all be required to work from home until the new building is ready. This is to remind you that you must move out of the building by Oct. 24th. blah blah etc.

Needless to say I was unimpressed and politely replied, pointing out that neither I nor the Director of IT (who was also on the email) were in fact Salesmen, had ever been Salesmen or were intending to make a career change selling cars, real estate or intellectual property and consequently there had been a mistake.

The reply I got was even less impressive, along the lines of.
"I'm just working off the list I was given."
No apology. No "I'll look into this, since Principal Engineer doesn't sound the same as like Salesman of the month.

So I asked "If you are not in charge of this move, then who is in charge of this move and I will talk to them?"

I got no response at all to this question and whoever it was probably "wasn't on the list" the person had been given and therefore she was unable to respond.

At this point some people would have gotten upset, called their managers, ranted down the phone at the HR department or used other corporate Elisa-eque therapy.

I decided to do none of these since in fact I don't work much in the office anyway. I do a lot of my work from home, Fedex Office (aka Kinkos) and coffee shops in the Bay Area anyway. Over the past few weeks I've been using maps.google.com to manage my commute. It's a great tool for avoiding traffic jams caused either by accidents or just too much traffic. My analysis shows that it 9 times out of 10 it is quite impossible to go to the office before 10:00am or to leave after 16:30pm without getting stuck in a jam, so quite simply I don't. I just carry on working until Google tells me the road is clear. After all I'm not paid to sit in traffic jams for hours on end clogging up the Freeways and pumping tons of CO into the atmosphere- I'm paid to produce stuff and I can do that pretty much anywhere.

So starting next week, I'm putting the car in the garage and leaving it there. I'm getting on my bike and I'm looking forward to my new life without any need to drive 38 miles a day and I believe that all in all being called a Salesman probably wasn't so bad after all. [Just this once :-) ]