Road Tools

Have Treo, Will Travel

By Tonya Poole, 4-07-06

The question is debatable: is being connected on the road more or less freeing than going without? The answer of course depends on who you are, why you travel and what you find yourself sacrificing by being away from the office. I'm partner-at-large in a small, two-person creative studio. Being self-employed with no support staff therefore means that any vacation we take is likely to be a working vacation, lest the studio wilt in our absence. So being connected on the road is critical if I want to wander away from the desk for more than a few days. And trust me: I want to.

Over the last couple of years we've taken mammoth trips that each kept us away for six weeks at a time. In the fall of 2004 it was a 14,000-mile road trip in an oval across North America and back in a conversion van with two kids and two big dogs. During the holidays last year it was a west coast family tour for Thanksgiving, and an east coast family tour for Christmas and New Years – though we learned a few lessons from the year before and let the dogs stay home, took the kids and opted for a borrowed Kia.

In both cases there was just no way around it: I had to work from the road, not only to help finance the trip with rising gas prices but to ensure neglected clients didn't defect in a long line behind me. So my laptop and all its heavy, unwieldy accoutrements tagged along on both trips. I might as well have just stayed home.

For about 12 collective weeks I struggled in hotel rooms with unreliable dialup connections, wrestled with the hot, noisy machine in my lap in the passenger seat at 65 mph in the middle of nowhere, lugged ten pounds or more of equipment everywhere we went and spilled water, orange juice and other food and beverage on it during breakfast at any number of diners across the country. Because, after all, Independent Contractor's Law states that clients will most often need urgent design and editorial changes just as the fork full of egg enters the mouth.

At the end of the last road trip, I went shopping for straight-jackets and shackles for my office chair.

But technology, shortcomings aside, never fails to deliver. On a train trip last fall back to New England to photograph a friend's wedding I was teased over and over again at nearly every metro station by big, bright, clever and colorful Palm Treo 650 Smartphone advertisements plastered to every large available surface. It was a brilliant strategy on Palm's part: hit the frustrated traveler with the dead laptop battery and the sore, drooping shoulder right where, and when, it hurts.

Four months later, I finally caved and called Verizon to upgrade.

This comparatively tiny little piece of wireless Internet-enabled technology has in the space of just a couple of months completely changed the way I work and travel. Our home and studio are in a rural mountain area just shy of 60 miles from the nearest town over 5,000. Pre-Treo, I had to run into town at odd evening hours for short periods of time, wave in passing to friends who barely recognized me anymore and then rush home to check project status updates, urgent emails, meeting requests and other things I was dangerously untethered to for the two hours round-trip. Now I'm languishing around town for whole days and nights, lingering at book stores, catching a movie with the kids, nursing a smoothie at Milagros... knowing that if anyone should need me, my pocket will violenty vibrate and I can, in most cases, resolve the issue on-the-spot: no laptop required. My shoulder is now inching its way up back into proper position.

There's something to be said for being unreachable sometimes, small business owner or not. But when it means the difference between being tied and bound to a desk and workstation or out there enjoying the world without anything hanging over my head or waiting impatiently for me back at the office, I call this one a big win. I'm getting emails in the middle of the barren desert, scheduling meetings from a gas station restroom, taking photos of roadside elk from the eye on the back of the phone while I'm talking on the other side of it, researching global climate changes over a long dinner, bidding on eBay finds from small town parking lots, solving client emergencies from my grandmother's hotel suite in Myrtle Beach and snagging $25-a-night hotel room deals through Priceline from crowded New York City bars.

Mobile technology continues to open up the road for us, and, as travel lovers and business owners, has let us blur personal and professional lives together so that focusing on one no longer means neglecting the other. Six weeks used to feel like a long time on the road, away from the office with that laptop attached to my limbs. This year? We're looking at eight weeks. Bring it on.

(now if only I could get it to water our plants...)

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