Another hard day at the office

I've been away from the computer most of the week. I just had to do a little work on one spreadsheet for a report that's due - but for once I did it sitting in an air-conditioned hotel lobby, occasionally looking at the palm trees wafting in the warm (it's about 32C today) breeze that's just crossed the ocean from the Sahara desert.

It was always a great fantasy when i was young to go and live wherever we went on holiday. Didn't want to go home, why couldn't we stay here all the time? Well, back then, one of the reasons was that staying in a seaside town in Wales would mean working in the tourist industry in a seaside town in Wales - there was nothing else to do other than perhaps fishing. It just wasn't practical. The work was in the city where we lived and the holiday was somewhere away from any city.

Now it's different. Over coffee with my friend Luis, who lives here, a friend I made on the internet ten years ago or more, he was boasting not only of his easy sub-tropical lifestyle: living close to everything you want in a city but with total quiet most of the time and 300m to the beach - and he is in the European Union, with cheap direct flights to all the large cities of Europe and has a 300Mbps fibre connection so he can still do all the work he would do anywhere else.

When I was at school, forty years ago, this was called teleworking, it was a vision of the future that our teachers explained to us with a sarcastic grin - of course it would never really happen, it was just a theory, we would make cars and chocolate just like our dads and grandads.

But no, it's real. I'm doing part of my work here and now, not just the silly report but this blog post which will contribute to next week's income. Part of my "work" is shifting around bits of crypto - it's bizarre. I'm not up to complete freedom yet - my Steem income doesn't quite pay all the bills, but it's going a long way to making me truly independent. Big thanks to everyone who keeps hitting those upvote and resteem buttons!