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remote

Maybe I am only aware of the change because I come from the analog age. An era in which people succeeded in meeting on Saturday evenings without mobile phones, an era, in which you had to physically drive to a location for some trouble shooting on the so-called EDP systems (which were huge cabinet-like monsters housed in cellars). These assignments involved carrying weighty manuals in the form of voluminous ring binders from customer to customer - and a company car robbed was such a catastrophe due to the loss of the manuals with all the meticulously compiled personal comments and all the experience gained.

Which goes to show: it is NOT true that everything used to be better - in fact, it is quite the opposite.

Today, we have remote functionalities. It has been a long time since I spent about 70% of my working time on the road, in a company car. Instead, I spend my time at work in a pleasant office – and weekend work can be handled from home.

While I go to the Mothers room at the company, and breast feed my child remotely (well – it is a bit like a screen session on the terminal – I prepare the milk and the bottles and then ctrl-a-d (detach) and my husband, when he opens up the refrigerator, does a kind of "screen -r" and attaches himself to the session) I can simultaneously work on a customer server in England on a server in the north of Germany. One is a database, the other is a patch.

Admittedly: the assignment of brain CPU for London and Hamburg is handled by way of a manual time slicing process. Only the “breastfeeding“ can be accomplished in a parallel process. This is made possible thanks to an electrical, programmable double pump with a hands-free function. Ok, I will admit that I sent a feature request to Medela. I would really like to have a “bottle full“ sensor. That would prevent the nuisance of unsightly milk stains.

Who knows, maybe my request will be heard, and in the future, women will not have to frantically remove milk stains before the next customer appointment.

Remote functionalities also help save leisure time, your private life – and your relationships. Some 20 years ago, you could forget about half of your Sunday if you had to make configuration changes on a server on Sunday morning. Today, you can do the same work at home, between breakfast and lunch. You just disappear in your home office for about an hour or so, and then you are back.

And this is not only possible from home – thanks to UMTS you can do this kind of work almost anywhere. So don’t be surprised when you spot someone sitting in a supermarket parking lot bent over a laptop, or people deeply engrossed in their iPhones in one of Bavaria’s lovely beer gardens. They may not be socially dysfunctional nerds – but IT experts on hotline jobs.

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Veronika Lorenz

Veronika Lorenz heads the IT Services department at censhare. She is responsible for the conception, installation and management of censhare systems and databases, as well as their servers. As one of our seasoned professionals, she has been with censhare since 2001. Since 2009, she has become a mother and like all working parents, Veronika is trying to find the ideal work-life balance between job demands and parenting.

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