Originally appeared in the Computer User

REPRINT RIGHTS FOR SALE
(Click here for permission.)

Stimulate the economy, give a poet a dollar.

I enjoyed serving this essay up for you, and I did it for free. But this writer is currently out of work, and a bit of revenue would gladden his heart. If you'd like to contribute to this site, consider dropping a $1 tip in the "Honor Box" here. Just click the CLICK TO PAY image here. Thanks - Mike

Check out The NEW Why Teams Don't Work WINNER, Financial Times/Booz Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award, "Best Management Book, 1995" by Mike & Harvey Robbins from Berrett-Koehler Publishers

When people think of problems on the road, the topic is usually technological. Do I have enough memory, is the chip speed fast enough, is there enough storage on the hard drive. Most purchases are made with these considerations in mind.

But I'm here to tell you that, when you have put the safety and techno-serenity of your office in the rearview mirror, your computing problems will have nothing to do with any of these things. These are the things that make your skin crawl; and your hair stand on end.

To paraphrase Kipling, if you can experience these and keep your head about you when everyone else is losing theirs, then you are a man/woman, my son/daughter. With the side benefit of being almost a full foot taller than everyone else.

Thinking you have data you don't. Before heading out on your trip you take a blank floppy diskette and load it with the files you think you will need. You take the three or four files you are currently working on, plus maybe an address book database. It's not until you are setting up shop in Hells Bells, Montana that you realize you forgot your list of e-mail addresses, or worst case, the unlisted phone number of the client you promised you would call on the fifth day of your journey. How you going to handle that challenge? Solution: leave your computer at home running the whole time you are gone, so you can call in and download data remote. Shortcoming: what if you don't remember the file name?

Bringing a shotgun to a knife fight. How many times have you taken your laptop to a weekend event, and people made fun of you for lugging along your hardware? Whereas, if you'd brought a Newton, or one of those nifty palmtop Windows CE doodads, they'd all be clustered around your shoulder, oohing and ahhing. Solution: Ideally we shouldn't just have a laptop computer. We should have a vast array of different instruments, for use according to where we are going and what the task awaiting us is. If you're going to spend lots of time in a car or plane, it's tough to beat a minicassette recorder and coil-bound steno pad. If you're going to work on a big project, and be fairly stationery, like at a resort, or to visit family for three weeks, you might be happiest taking your desktop system. Shortcoming: where are you going to keep all this stuff when you're home?

Rural electrification. Welcome to Mulebutt Breath, Wyoming (Population 47), home of the shakiest current in the west. You're not in town long enough to check it out, but you have a strong suspicion power is supplied locally by a pair of prairie dogs in a spinning cage, and one of the prairie dogs has a gimp in his gate. When you boot up, the overhead light dims, and the gas pump at the corner station slows down just a titch. This is the sort of current that brings mighty power supplies crashing to their knees. Solution: bring a dozen surge suppressors, plug them into each other in circle-the-wagons fashion, and plug your PC into the last one. Shortcoming: your line filters may shut down the strip mining equpment "Future Shoes" of town.

Up the creek without a plug-in. You can be off on vacation having a wonderful time typing up some project on a picnic table and thinking, don't we live in a marvelous age, having computers in pup tents? But when you are finished you still have the issue of delivery. You didn't bring a printer of course, and you don't know anyone in that particular national forest whose printer you can commandeer. So you drive from town to town, searching for a modular plug modem to plug your PCMCIA fax card into. This is nowhere near as easy as it sounds. Pay phones are unpluggable. People out on the perimeter often still have the old nonmodular plugs. And who do you ask? The woman in the post office just whistles. The man in the diner doesn't know what a modem is. The library wants to see your card. Motels want you to check in before making a call. How about that kid on the Schwinn, buying Ding Dongs at the 7-11. Hey, kid, can I come to your house and call the Internet? You'd be loaded in a paddywagon before you could say Michael Jackson. Solution: go to a computer salvage shop and buy an old acoustic coupler modem. Just clap it on a voice phone receiver and you're online. Shortcoming: Won't let you surf the Web.

Old dogs and new tricks. You use this laptop only about every three weeks, when you make a trip. The rest of the time you use your desktop machine. That is the machine your fingers know; that is the system your brain has committed to body memory. So when you thunk your little finger on your left hand to the space where the CTRL key should be, you strike the CAPS LOCK key instead, and the next paragraph you type has to be retyped. Every three weeks you go out, and make this same mistake. You call Dell, your laptop maker, and ask if there is a solution. There isn't. The key can't be disabled or reassigned to a different meaning. Nor can it be removed: doing so is like opening up a sucking wound into which lint and Pepsi will be drawn from the four corners of the earth. Solution: tape a warning message over the key, on hunter-red fluorescent Post-it paper ("STOP!!") Shortcoming: You still will hit the key and feel like an even bigger numbnut.

A dream of gravity. You're walking out of the courtroom. Using your laptop you just won your small claims court case, nailing four delinquent clients who owed you a total of $2,750. As you head down the 55-step marble staircase, you feel the comfortable bump of the laptop case against your hip. Suddenly, you feel the latch of the case snap open, the clamshell case opens wide, and the laptop somersaults in slow motion from its protected position, hitting the first step on the corner, double barreling to the next step, and so on, bang, bang, bang, all the way to the bottom of the stairs, where it rests in a frazzled heap at the feet of the statue of Blind Justice. Sure, you wake up almost immediately, back at home, with the crickets chirping outside your window. But will you go right back to sleep? I don't think so. Solution: Never sue people for the exact sum your laptop costs, even in your unconscious. And get a computer case with a zipper.

Security worries. How can I put this succinctly. OK: how would you like to travel for a month in a van with your family, knowing you have a valuable item inside? There will be times you can't carry it with you, or take it with you into a motel room. You're a million miles from home, and you know how easy it is to bust into a locked car, or for that matter, a motel room. My family was in the Cascade Mountains two years ago, near Mount Baker, and we stopped to hike up a mountainside to a site called Twenty Two Lake. A sign at the parking area sternly warned us that the are had a history of break-ins. We were tenting, new in town, we had a nice laptop we didn't want to lose (much less the data on the computer), and we had a steep hill that would take us four hours to ascend and descend. We took our chances, buried the computer in a pile of dirty laundry, and hoped our banged up Grand Voyager did not prove irresistible to thieving eyes. And we were not robbed. But my mind didn't leave that pile of laundry for the entire four hours I was gone, scaling the snow capped mountain and pausing by the placid turquoise waters. Solution: Do what Long John Silver did, and bury the computer in a plastic bag, and shoot the people who dug the hole. Shortcoming: you just shot your kids.

Turn off that bleeping thing, you moron. No one really practices good battery management with their portable computers. As a result, phantom memory spots gradually wipe out the recharge capabilities of your machine. If it was 2.5 hours when you bought it, it is closer to 45 minutes after a year. But you still have that 2.5 figure in your head, and you think you can take in one meeting without the benefit of AC cable. Five minutes into the meeting, your computer starts to beep and your shutdown function goes haywire. No one can get a word in edgewise. next year's sales strategy will have to wait until your notebook stops doing its impression of R2D2. Solution: never, ever, try to use your laptop without the AC cable. Shortcoming: you left it in your hotel room.

Too heavy. I once was a young buff hardbody with buns of steel, but that was before my rollerblading accident in Eagle River, Wisc. in 1994. Tore up my leg and side, and broke my wrist real good. The wrist never healed quite right, so now when I tote that 25 pound laptop case from place to place, I feel it in my joints. Sure, I can switch hands from time to time, but doggone it, that bag is heavy. And I can just feel what the pulling is doing to my wrist joint at the insterstitial level -- s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g it. But what can you do to lighten the load? Leave your manual at home? Your power cables? The add-in mouse that allows you to sidestep that awful lint-packed trackball? Dragging this thing around with me, I begin to understand those Tarzan movies where the colonials hired natives to carry bundles on their heads. But I'm not sure Scandinavians will do it. Solution: Get a carrying case with wheels, like the flight attendants use. Or let Ingmar handle it.

Miles from support. And you have promises to keep. You bought a Dell Latitude laptop because of Dell's impressive service warranty. But how do you get Dell's authorized service person to visit you on the floor of the Grand Canyon, or in a trailer cabin way up in the Smokies? Say you are in-flight, en route to London, and your hard disk starts to smell like a tar roof on a hot day. Who do you call? Where do they meet you? How do they keep up with you on your journey? For that matter, if your warranty information is on the computer, along with the Dell BBS number, how do you even contact them? Solution: always take a spare laptop on important trips. Shortcoming: You will need Ingmar to help carry it.

Something's wrong. By far the biggest problem road warriors face has nothing to so with hardware and everything to do with software, i.e., you. You have these expectations of being able to work on seat-back tray tables, in airport lounges, park benches, and hotel lobbies. But when you try to do any of these things, you find you just sit there. While your laptop is functioning at it peak levels, you suddenly seem to be short about 40 IQ points. The vibrations of the jet engine, the people dragging their luggage across the lobby, the videotext messages on the hotel TV, the pigeons landing on the sidewalk outside are all more interesting than that nasty old spreadsheet you need to work on. Solution: Stay home. Smell roses. Be all that you can be. Ingmar can always take your place.

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.