TELECOMMUTING

by Grant Palmer

October 29, 1999

My wife and I decided to move our family to Arizona. I still liked my NASA job and wanted to keep doing it. My supervisor and I worked out an arrangement where I could telecommute.

My 4-year-old son and I drove down from San Jose to Phoenix. Our car was mostly stuffed with my computer equipment. Even though we were traveling in June, we actually got caught in a snowstorm when we were driving over the Sierra's. My chains, of course, were in the back corner of my trunk, and I would have had to take all the computer stuff out to get them. Luckily, I went over the pass just before the Highway Patrol was going to close the road so we made it.

I've set up one of the rooms in our house to be my office. I couldn't bring down all of my stuff, but I brought down quite a bit. I have a Mac, a workstation, a printer, and a scanner. I filled up the closet with all of my papers.

A typical work day goes like this. I take my children to daycare and then come home and log into the NASA computer systems. I do this by dialing in to a NASA machine with my modem. Once I'm connected, I can do almost everything I used to do. I check my computer jobs, analyze data, sometimes I participate in teleconferences. The only thing that is not so good is that I was so used to the high-speed communication lines at NASA that my 56K modem seems really slow.

I really like telecommuting and hope I can keep doing it. The initial deal was for six months. I'm trying to get an extension right now, so I can keep contributing to the Space Technology programs at NASA.