Answering questions back at the office Lindsay McRory February 29, 1996 Our departure from Titusville, Florida, creeps closer, and with it our voyage into the Caribbean. Before we head south, I paid a visit to my company's head office in Toronto, Canada. I was hesitant about leaving Denise, Kita, and Wesley alone on the boat. It's not like a house. Originally I was only supposed to be gone three days, but there was much to be done and the trip lasted well over a week. Having not actually seen my co-workers in six months, it was interesting to that most had the same series of questions about life away from the office, and aboard the Hakuna Matata: How's working and cruising going? Generally pretty good. It makes for some pretty long days, though. When do you get any work done? I tend to roll with the current project workload and with our existing daily schedule. When at dock or at anchor, the norm is to spend a few hours on work first thing in the morning and then resume work late in the afternoon through the evening. If the deadlines are tight I will do the normal cramming. One trick is to have a quick nap when the kids go to bed at 7:30 p.m. and get up at 9 p.m. to put in another four to five hours of work. As with the kids' schooling, we don't really observe weekends, holidays, or vacations. On those days when we are making long passages, I may work from the cockpit if conditions are decent. Are you productive? Anyone I work with knows I am very productive. If you took the typical day at the office, cut out the commute to work, the water cooler chat, and the routine interruptions, how many hours are actually spent doing real work? I used to spend nine or ten hours a day at the office, but couldn't get any real work done until I got back home. And my work requires fairly long hours of concentration. I couldn't do it at the office anyway. What worries you the most about work on the boat? I'm dead without our communications system. I am considering a second satellite system as a spare. We have three computer systems on board that are mostly redundant. Our collection of textbooks, however, can be wiped out by a mishap from a single open hatch. Computer diskettes seem to have a short life span. So, we are looking at alternative mediums for backups. Is the cost of doing business higher? It depends on what you're used to. GSA Consulting has offices all over Canada and the United States, so long-distance communications charges and courier expenses are the norm. The per-minute communications costs for me are slightly higher, about 30 cents per minute more. But I have no monthly line charges or PBX charges, and I don't need a desk, office, or parking. What's the most frustrating? Not too much is frustrating. I believe that some of the people who don't work with me regularly probably think the whole concept is a scam. How can you work and sail every day? Certainly most members of the gray-haired fraternity find the idea inconceivable, although some admit they think I have brass huevos for trying it. I think the biggest misconception people have is how much time we're actually sailing from point to point. From Kingston, Ontario, to Titusville, Florida, it's been 240 days. Of those, 18 days were hard ocean passages. Add another 38 short day trips down the Intercoastal Waterway and we've logged about one day in five actually on the water sailing, and one day in 15 in which we were making a long passage. There's lots of time for office work and boat work. Have you met other people doing the same thing? Writers and journalists have been doing this for years. As for being plugged in on a day-to-day basis, I seem to be on the bleeding edge. Cost-effective communications have only been available for five weeks, although I've been able to patch together communications links using cellular services. The compact size of modern computer systems allows me to use serious software on my laptop. Go back three or four years and ask someone if they would consider running a complete Windows system and a complete UNIX system on a laptop and you would get a few smirks. In the past, it made a lot of sense to have software-developer groups in one location to share access to technical manuals. Now everything's on CD-ROM. I expect to see more people doing their work from remote locations in the future. Do you like working on the boat? I really do. I keep telling Kita, "The brain is a muscle that needs exercise." It's nice to have the time and the quiet to get right into the guts of a project. And I think I would be more susceptible to the "cruiser's blues" if not for the work link. Did it seem strange being in the office again? Jumping back into the sociology of an office environment after being on the boat for the last six months is a little strange. I didn't realize it before, but like Kita in her schooling, I like to sit down and grind the work out. Back in the office, I found it difficult to do much more than go from meeting to meeting. It's really weird to think about how much of office work involves some form of tribal ritual as opposed to actual work. It was very nice seeing everyone, but I couldn't wait to get back to the boat and dig back into real work. Flags. It's customary to fly a courtesy flag of the country you're visiting from under your starboard spreader. Given the number of countries we are planning on visiting, purchasing all the flags at $20 to $24 would cost more than $480. Some cruisers make their own from colored fabric, some cruisers use permanent markers on white cloth to make their courtesy flags. We haven't decided what we'll do yet. This is far from a complete list, but rather a snapshot of things we have been working on in the last week or so.