Working in the office

My usual workday is within the confines of my own office at home. My commute is but 13 stairs long. There’s generally no noise, except for the occasional child running down the hallway or beating on my doorway. If people want to get a hold of me, they either have to IM, email, or phone me. This week, I am actually having to go into an actual office to do work.

One of the biggest benefits and drawbacks from working at home all the time is the isolation. Oh sure, my wife and kid are around, but facetime with your colleagues is a wonderful thing. It can also be “too much” of a good thing (assuming you want to actually get work done! :). I do work when I’m in the office (meetings), but it seems like I also spent a lot of time “socializing” too. I look at it this way: I’m only in the office a few times a year and I have to essentially “get my fill” of socialization and facetime during those brief visits.

The other problem with working in the office is the network. At home, I essentially VPN into the office using a couple of different methods. This lets me act as if I’m on the corporate network. Unfortunately, the corporate security policies forbid a lot of activities that are helpful in my job. At home, all my “other” machines are behind a firewall with basically unfettered access to the Internet, or at least I control the firewall. Within the office, there is no such thing as an easily accessible Internet connection. Pretty much all outgoing access must occur through proxies. This prevents me from, say, using my BroadvoxDirect Sipura in the office, or at least makes it significantly more difficult to do so. Note that I’m not arguing the rationality of the policies in place–if I were in charge, I’d probably have similar requirements, though I might implement them differently.

tags: firewalls, corporate security policy, voip