Submitting this (brief) dispatch to re-state the obvious: Work has almost nothing to do with place and has less and less to do with time as well.
I am writing this on Saturday morning from the extremely well-appointed customer service waiting area (can't fairly call this a 'room', it is larger than my first three apartments I think), at my local auto dealer as my sweet ride gets some maintenance/gets a safety recall item fixed.
A quick look around reveals two wide screen TVs, (one on Fox News, one on ESPN), several sofas and chairs, a massive two-sided fireplace, a cafe area with free coffee, water, soft drinks, cookies, and most importantly for the rest of this story - free and pretty fast Wifi.
Of course the car dealer waiting area has Wifi. Everyplace has Wifi now. We, many of us anyway, will choose a restaurant or coffee shop simply on the basis of Wifi access itself. So the fact that the auto dealer offers customer wifi is not really a big deal.
But what is interesting as I look around the room on this Saturday morning (it is about 9:25 AM local time), is what many of the folks waiting here are actually doing.
I am writing this blog post, (but I am kind of a loser without much going on so maybe I don't count).
The guy at the table next to me is coding, a side project that he is working on outside of his day job (I asked him what he was working on).
Another guy on one of the sofas is catching up on email (I didn't ask him, but a casual/nosy glance over his shoulder revealed the unmistakably bland user interface that is Outlook).
A woman has been off and on her phone for the last 20 minutes in deep discussion and negotiation about some kind of insurance contracts with a supplier of her business.
And a young-ish couple is seated together at another table staring at the same laptop and are engaged in pretty deep conversation. I am not exactly sure what is going on there, but decided to let them be and not get too weird/creepy in the waiting area.
Almost everyone here seems to be working on something. At the auto dealer waiting room on a Saturday morning. I am not really sure if that is a good or bad thing. I do think it is wonderful and great customer service that the dealer has provided such a welcoming and accommodating environment so people can work. But I also, and maybe this is because I am old enough to recall when waiting at the auto dealer meant 90 minutes of pure hell in a tiny, dirty room with old issues of Car & Driver the only distraction, wonder if this is really healthy.
I know that I am a little messed up for spending my Saturday mornings blogging.
But I thought I was the only strange one. There is an entire roomful of folks with me this morning who are, equally, strange.
Have a great week!