For Christmas I bought myself a dog blow dryer. I’ve needed one forever, but until I moved to the boonies, had access to a grooming facility with high speed dryers and grooming tables and raised tubs and all that great stuff. Now it is more than an hour away and I can only use it when the grooming day is done — 4:00 or so. I needed to make some adjustments. In one of the bathrooms at the Los Lunas house I added a hand-held shower head on an 8-foot long water hose, but the people hair dryer does not work on Cardis — unless you and the dog have lots to talk about. So the dog dryer was on the list and I decided a couple of weeks ago it was MY Christmas list that it was on. I found one that didn’t pull too much amperage (trying not to blow the breaker switches too often) and is bright green. So, it’s at the house waiting for Holmes and the puppies.
That’s not really what this post is about though. It’s about how long a commute I created. It’s about not getting home in time to watch the early news and falling asleep before the 10:00 news. It’s about having so much to do in the morning that I haven’t read the entire newspaper since I moved the end of September. The answer is to work from home a couple of days a week. The problem I’ve encountered is that although I can remote in to my work computer and pull up documents that I created, I couldn’t see the paper files that contain anything created by anyone else. So, for Christmas, my firm gave itself a Fujitsu SnapScan S1500. It’s cute and compact. It scans both sides of documents at once, can scan color or black and white, can scan the documents as searchable .pdf or convert them to Xcel or Word. It’s able to scan 1000 pages a day. So, my high school helper will start next week running my files through the scanner. In addition to making my “work at home two days a week” dream come true, it will permit me to store closed files on CDs or DVDs instead of in banker boxes. The scanner will pay for itself in cost of gasoline in no time at all. Isn’t it cute?
Opened Up — just needing to be plugged in to power and a USB port
. . . and here it is closed up: 7″ x 11-1/2″ x 6″ H
I know it’s not as cool as a bright green dog blow dryer, but I think this puppy will make my work life (and my home life) so much better.
Merry Christmas to me!
I love that I have all of our accounting documents scanned at work now. It was a long process to scan every invoice, etc: I started the back stuff in August of 2004 and finished a couple of months ago. It’s made a big difference in our work lives.
Funny the things that make us happy.
I’m spending Christmas weekend doing payroll updates for our clients 🙂
Neither The Huz or I could live without the ability to log in from home – he works 7:30 – 6 every day, then has dinner with us and we get the kiddo to bed and it’s downstairs to his basement office to work another few hours. I use it more when the kid is sick and I can’t make it into the office. My office has gone almost paper-free and I love it…nothing better than accessing the common drive and being able to see all my files anytime I need them. The Huz downloads blueprints and can do takeoffs at home off his laptop. Obviously, there’s a lot of excitement around the house with everyone plugged in….
It took me over 4 years of hounding, but I finally have a computer set up to work from home. I live 85 miles from my job, so this means no more 12-13 hour days. I’m thinking who ever came up with working from home should be granted sainthood.
Unfortunately I have to manage people at the day job. I’m not sure sometimes how much work gets done when I’m not there. I can do a lot from home (or on the road) though. I can even access my work computer from my phone. Logmein has an Android version.
Ain’t technology grand?! 🙂 I too get a work from home day once a week thanks to VPN connections and high speed internet. I am 25 miles from work and here in the DC area, 25 miles can sometimes take 2 hours! Fortunately, my company also supports flex-time, so I rarely leave for work before 10am.
Working from home rocks.
I think a scanner that will allow you to do so is JUST as exciting as a hair dryer.
🙂
Great decisions, Penni. The commute can be a monster. Merry Christmas!