Now my commute is just to the big middle window of our second floor. It is a lot easier than the long walk that I used to take to the barn and certainly better than the almost four hours of driving from Roanoke, Virginia to Reston, Virginia, in my Apple/federal account call days.
Still, it is probably good that I had pioneer blood from the start. I did go off to Canada and its cheap land after college. It was not long before I decided to get serious about cattle after spending a couple of years remodeling an old house and chasing a few cows around the North Mountain of Nova Scotia.
Making hay on the foggy slopes that run down to the Bay of Fundy was not the best idea so we moved to New Brunswick and made a lot of big round bales hay over ten years for our herd of Angus that grew to two hundred before we had our dispersal in 1982. It was during those years on the farm when my first home office appeared.
Those first years, the home office was pen and pencil, sometimes my old college typewriter and a strange copier that smelled of the old mimeograph machines in my elementary school. Then the spring after the cattle left the farm, I took a job as a field man for the Maritime Angus Association.
The marketing that I had done for our dispersal impressed a few people and they wanted me to write a newsletter and help market the Angus breed. I was always pleased that they asked me to write instead of judge cattle. The first newsletter that I wrote took over three days to churn out on the typewriter and I am a pretty good typist. Then it took nearly three days to copy and address the newsletters. I knew there was a better way since I had spent my first winter not taking care of cows reading computer magazines and visiting the one local computer store in Fredericton, New Brunswick.
Luckily, my mother, the one who was adamant about me going to college, was desperate for me to do anything beside chase cows and ride around on a tractor. She bought me an Apple II+ computer, an Epson MX-80 printer, and the right software. It was one of the first home computers that came to New Brunswick. The next newsletter was written in a matter of hours. The labels for them printed in two minutes and thirty seconds. This was the beginning of my first really productive home office.
In a twist of fate that changed my life forever, the company who sold me the computer realized that I had the rare for the time ability to understand computers, explain them to others and sell them. I went into the computer business, became a sales manager, and we went from one store to five in less than two years.
When the company started chasing an IBM medallion, I started looking for a job with Apple which I got in October 1984. I started with Apple in November of that year and worked there until July 2004 when apparently I flew to close to the sun and my wings melted even though I was director of federal sales by then.
Over all that time and the years that followed, I learned the value of working from home. While I spent many days working out of offices, I always got more done from my home office. The idea that people work less at home always amused me. It was close to hilarious when various bosses preferred sales people to spend their time in the office filling out forecasts instead of calling on customers.
Fast forward to the pandemic years and I am still working from home and still very productive. The pandemic has changed the rules and working from home is now not only even smarter but also about the only way to do business safely. The pandemic has caused a seismic shift in the workplace. Many people have figured out what I long knew, home is where the office should be.
While I have battled for bandwidth most of my professional life, now it is no longer a problem since I have fiber running to my house and a symmetric 500 Mbps connection is only $85 per month.
Home offices that I have enjoyed- My first one on North Carolina's Crystal Coast.
My second office at the Crystal Coast. It came with the best view in the area.
My Roanoke office after I had to start over after a pipe sprung a leak.
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