As is true for all of us I suppose, the engine that makes farm life possible is our paying work. Maybe there will be a day when the place supports itself with produce and the sale of animals for processing, assuming we somehow avoid making them into pets. For now, however, I have had to figure out how to practice law from a home office three hours east of my real office in the tourist mecca of South Walton County. My guess is that a lot of you have had to find ways to solve the same problem over the last six months.
Despite being in my late 50s and technologically benighted, I was fully capable of figuring out as an initial matter that we needed a robust enough internet connection to correspond with the office, clients, and other lawyers. Actually, the choice was pretty straightforward--only one cable company would provide service out at Wyldswood, although oddly both of the two in town disclaimed ownership of the cable drooping from the phone line along the dirt driveway leading to our back gate.
The router provided by the cable company was puny in the extreme, so we were forced to purchase a stronger model to reach the home office, which is in an outbuilding behind the main house. Even then coverage was spotty, and we didn't have enough signal to make the TV work or stream anything. A friend in town recommended the only IT guy in the county to help us solve the problem. The fact that he was older than I made me question his bona fides as a tech person, and my suspicions grew as he wandered the house for two days trying to find a place where the router signal might reach the office. Are we paying this guy by the hour? He also talked P's ear off with a discourse on politics and his notions of family values, to which she responded with a thin-lipped smile as she tried to escape to her tractor.
Finally that problem was solved, and I had enough signal to start mediating using both GoToMeeting and Zoom. The other lawyers all preferred the latter, so it became the only platform I bothered to learn at a basic level of proficiency.
Law is a document-intensive exercise, and my workdays were slowed to a crawl by the fact that I could not access the firm server. Our initial solution was to have a laptop back in the office continuously connected to the server, with some sort of wonky program that allowed remote access when it worked, which was rarely. All the other times, I had to email my paralegal and ask her to send me files as email attachments. Hard to believe that in 2020 we had no cloud-based system, but the panhandle lags in things like technology. And dental care. And whatever issues led to the War Between the States.
Thankfully, Peg's son Issac is something of an IT wizard, who's been at this since he was in middle school and the internet was just becoming a thing. Now something of a world traveler as a consultant for a major software provider, he still takes time to help the paunchy anachronism of a fighter pilot his mother married struggle through the mysteries of remote work. Actually, he helps both of us--his mother calls him immediately whenever she has a computer or phone issue. I think she just likes the sound of his voice. I usually text him with a question, which leads to an immediate call from him because my complaint that I can't get the "thingie" to work isn't sufficiently descriptive to advise as to a solution.
With Issac's help, we now have a NAS ("network attached storage") unit next to the computer, with a pair of one terabyte external hard drives to which my paralegal copied all my files off the firm's servers. Both she and I have access, so working on case files is as seamless as if I were sitting in the office back in Santa Rosa Beach.
Of course, with late summer came thunderstorms, which periodically knock out the power at Wyldswood and with it, the NAS. For this issue, which is impossible to fix when we're not on the farm to turn the unit back on, Issac suggested a UPS ("uninterruptible power source"), which plugs into the surge protector and contains a large battery to run the equipment until we have electricity again. As I sit here in SoWal, the NAS seems to be dead, so I guess there was operator error on my part when I hooked up the UPS.
We also invested in a decent but clunky HP printer/scanner, with which I wrestled for a half day trying to get my computer to see it. I also have a little portable printer, smaller than a loaf of bread, to take with me to in-person mediations (if those ever happen again) for printing settlement agreements.
So, that's the technology lineup at the Wyldswood home office. Although there have been growing pains, this year has been as productive as any other in my law practice, and maybe more so because there's no drive to work or office banter. Plus, I get to bill my time in shorts and bare feet, then join P for a toddie and a dip into the truck bed pool after work. Not all bad.
Tomorrow I promise something a little more sylvan. I just figured there might be some interest in how we have resolved, vel non, the technical challenges of working remotely.
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