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Telecommuters and Downtime?
clearcache asks: "I'm a new telecommuter. My wife and I, former New Jersey residents, moved to a Midwestern city in January. I remain employed with the same NYC company that I worked for when we lived in Jersey. Aside from the normal moving hassles, I experienced some connectivity issues due to the complete incompetence of my telephone company. These issues repeated themselves, and, due to the lack of a good problem escalation policy on their end, it took quite some time to get them resolved (some are not yet resolved!). These problems resulted in a serious loss of time on the job. When I approached the phone company to discuss compensation for downtime, they responded that, since it is a residential line, they do not compensate for downtime. With more and more people telecommuting, it's only a matter of time before the blurred distinction between 'residential' and 'business' telephone lines becomes an issue. Has anyone had experiences like this? If so, what did you do? Does anyone have any general advice about telecommuting and pitfalls that I should avoid in the future? How do the companies that you work for deal with your downtime?" When my connections to the 'net fail and I can't find someplace in the area where I can leech some bandwidth, I am forced into taking the day off. Fortunately for me, Blacksburg, VA is extremely well connected for its size and such occurances have remained rare. How do you telecommuters out there deal with those Bad Computing Days, where for one reason or another, things just refuse to work?
"How do you telecommuters out there deal with those Bad Computing Days, where for one reason or another, things just refuse to work? "
Simple, I read a good book or spend time with my friends. Seriously, this sounds like complaining about getting a day off of school because it is too icy out or something.
It depends on what your work is, of course, but I would simply make sure that I can get work done even with a net outage. Mirror essential documents or code pieces locally, and you can get something done anyway. There is always documentation to write, proposals to tinker with or reading to catch up on. And if you need to talk to a colleague, there's always still the telephone...
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
You have a RESIDENTIAL line. They're not going to sue you/disconnect you/etc for using it for some business purposes, but there are no guarantees.
I'm sure they will gladly refund the % of your montly bill for your downtime, but other than that, don't expect anything.
Want to know why a business line is 120$ for a base line when a residential one is 25$? Service expectations and guarantees.
Your residential line is for your convenience. That's why it's cheap. You don't pay much, and you don't expect much.
A business line is expensive. You pay a lot, you expect a lot.
Heh, if slashdot was an auto/truck site:
"I use my mazda sport-truck to haul three tons of gravel 5 days a week. I don't want to buy a utility truck, it's too expensive, but mazda said my warranty didn't cover the drivetrain breakdown! What's wrong with them!"