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Day Thirteen: Assessing the Mobile Office

Approaching two weeks on the road now, it’s time to take stock of our mobile office.

First, what’s NOT picture:

32″ LCD Monitor
Keyboard & Guitar (Johannes is writing a song for a video game)
Johannes’ laptop (he was working at time of photo)
Professional speakers (see note above re: song)

One thing the discerning reader will note is that for the most part these are HUGE space hogs. They live in the X-cargo along with some camping gear and excessive blankets (more for padding than anything else).

They are also not essential for daily mobile office work. The essentials are fairly simple and in this order of importance:

Blackberry
Laptop
Hard drives
Hard copies of current projects/client files
Ridiculous amounts of cables and power supplies and adapters
Travel speakers

A typical day on the road starts with finding a wi-fi hotspot and logging onto Twitter; Facebook; This Blog; Google Reader; Email.

Then the driving ensues. Sometimes the drive takes us to meet someone cool like Flying Horse or SmartWool or Weise Communications or KGBTexas…or a stellar Rainbow Trout. Other times, it’s just driving (did I mention Texas is BIG?).

In between the kids taking naps and getting pulled over by the fuzz, we bang out some work. In moments of bliss, like today, we are hosted by friends scattered across this great land. Sure beats sleeping in the car during a thunderstorm in the middle of the night in Idaho.

Which is only slightly worse than sleeping in scary motel rooms.

What’s amazing about this journey is that while the modern trappings of technology make it possible, it’s the people that make it worth doing. Old school, face-to-face meetings still are the single best way to get to know a person, a business or even a trend.

Connecting the dots along America’s highways and backroads via invisible airwaves is crazy cool. It’s amazing how you can drive for hours without a soul in sight and then stumble upon some small town that is so small it doesn’t even have a McDonald’s…yet it has an Internet Cafe. These are where all the weary travelers congregate to reconnect to whatever world they’ve left behind. And in so doing, we find that there is much more we have in common…from cowboys and truck drivers to Lance Armstrongesque cyclists and hitchhikers. And yes, even a traveling PR road show.

Behind it all…the technology, the social media, the endless driving…is the fabric of success that is held together and made excellent and beautiful by the people we meet along the way.

So yeah, here’s my mobile office. It’s good only in so much as it has allowed me to meet people I might never have met before.

This might just have to become a tradition. Happy travels.