How to Work Remotely During a Power Outage

Ryan Purvis 0:00
Hello, and welcome to the digital workspace works podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Buckner. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines, the problems they face and how they solve them. The years they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took, they will help you to get to grips with the digital workspace inner workings

Heather Bicknell 0:33
and my headphones into the microphone. But sometimes, it is where I need to restart, so I just decided to do it. Is everything plugged in? But you couldn't hear me? So? Yeah, that's usually step number one. No, I had just I deconstructed my work setup. Because they had to work from here, there and everywhere. At the end of last week, so I just needed to plug all the things back in. And I missed one more

Gerard McGovern 1:15
time if I will do. How's your power situation? Hillsdale?

Heather Bicknell 1:21
Yeah. So it came back last night, late last night. And it was supposed to be out. They were telling us until Monday or Tuesday night. So it was kind of a pleasant surprise, you know, just heard the air conditioning come back on and some lights and whatnot we'd left on came back on. So finally, I mean, we had been out since Thursday morning. So it's a long time.

Gerard McGovern 1:52
You see, when you can use your power guns, you will have a routine, we will go into a lot switches off before you wake up in the middle well with all the lights on the house, because you forgot to turn them all off.

Heather Bicknell 2:06
So you have a generator, right?

Gerard McGovern 2:09
Yeah, we do. I mean, the idea that is to generate about two months ago, I think I've used it once. And that was to set it up. Never use it again. I mean, it's very common here to have solar panels and inverter says common you guys got the money, we'll put it in, because the generators bloody noisy. And then what they do is they want the gas will have batteries as well. And also, you know, the solar generated power and the batteries. And then we need to do an S curve, which is the National Provider goes offline, they don't even notice that they're offline. And I'll have the main stuff on that circuit. So they'll have like TVs and lights. And why don't you guys have the ability to like boil the cable and that sort of thing. But it's just the lights, you can watch DVDs and it stays on. What I did is I put the ups and that keeps the router going. And the Wi Fi and then I've got enough time to get started. Generally, vegetarian is tied into the house so that the minute I turn that on, we have everything, everything accessible, which is obviously going to turn off hydro things. So you turn off your underfloor heating, you turn off your acorns and then you can probably get away with doing the microwave and kettle at the same time. But that's about it. You can't use a geezer and wave boil or whatever you guys call it. But that's six six kilowatts, seven kilowatts, something like that is about 25 liters of gas. Visual.

Heather Bicknell 3:51
Yeah, we had. So like I mentioned, it was pretty It was a mass outage that there was one generator going in the neighborhood, we went for a walk and I was like, Oh yeah, I can hear. They're so loud. At least this one was the gas powered generator. could hear it from a few blocks away for that house. But I think we might look into one for the winner because it's not so scary to you know, lose your power when it's you know, pretty warm and the temperatures okay. But data winner, that would be a whole different story.

Gerard McGovern 4:29
Yeah, so when we get back to the UK, that's one of the things I want to put in is the inverter the battery or with a capacitor now as well. And you can also feed back into the grid which has a lot of damage despite legal in the country here because you can hear it here this complex the method the power goes out came about six generators kick up, and it sounds like a bunch of tractors do drag racing. Yeah, pull more power longer. So it's an Default, the most pleasant experience, but my expectation in the future, they all gonna have power problems, we should all have some sort of redundancy.

Heather Bicknell 5:09
Yeah, I think I'd like to go the solar battery route, eventually, it's just expensive. It's where I am to get that going. And then you can sell power back to the grid, but they barely pay you anything for it. It's really not designed to, they don't want you doing it, essentially the power companies.

Gerard McGovern 5:29
Your choice is short sighted view. If you think about this, like, what I mean, let's use the most common example no clicker what blockchain is doing and distributed Ledger's worker stuff? That's decentralizing banking. But it's also it's decentralized in a way that you can still centralized. And I think power is a good example of something that you can have generation from anyway. And you can still consolidate it. And I've been fascinated here, but we've been in the country now nine months. And, you know, there's probably been 20 days of bad weather, and even on those bad weather days, and talking clouds and rain and stuff, this will be in southern sunshine. So the ability for a house to generate solar power is there, you know, so so the investment will pay for itself quite quickly, because, you know, you'd have a constant stream of power, you know, you'd have to, you don't have to give it back to the grid, you just don't have to pay them. Because you'd have a battery storage of the power and for the nighttime. But it is expensive. Are we talking five to $10,000 I guess I thought estimated for entry level system. And I don't know if you've got a pool, but most these guys have pools and stuff like that. So that you know, a little bit extra, because you have to cover the heat pumps and, and all that. So yeah, it's a project within I wouldn't say it's an all in one go. Like we've got sort of powers in the UK, sort of 1000. UK house, because that's not there. By law, you have to have one kilowatts in any new world. But you probably need. I'm guessing you probably need about five kilowatts, if you want enough to do the lights or the TVs and all that and still charge your batteries. Because we don't have a pool or anything like that. But yeah, I think it's a worthwhile investment in the long term.

Heather Bicknell 7:25
Yeah, definitely would help with that peace of mind. And, you know, a lot of losing everything in the fridge, which was a bummer. To start from scratch there. We looked at a house. When we were on the market that had a pool, it was the first house that we toured. And that's pretty unusual. Especially for sort of the price range, we were looking at, you know, some luxury homes might have an indoor pool, like some infinity kind of thing. Which is, you know, in my ideal dream houses what I would want, because outdoor pools here, they get, you know, the seasons pretty short for the maintenance you'd have to do, it's much more just most people just choose to go to a public pool or some country club or something like that.

Gerard McGovern 8:20
I mean, the era we live in, if you had to look on Google Maps, you'll see a couple polls, like maybe maybe one, one pool for maybe every 1012 houses. If you look here in Joburg, or Durban or even Cape Town, you probably find eight or eight or nine houses out of 12, whatever pool that you can visibly see. And depends on how much space you've got your garden suffered. Because the weather is typically so hot all the time, you want to have those sorts of things. But as the other thing, you also have cheap labor, you could hire a gardener that could go off to the pool. And, you know, cost you very little for what you're doing. So that's the other reason why guys do because the maintenance isn't that bad because they've got a guard to the desert, or they're paying a pool service that comes in as part of doing the garden anyway. So the cost is not high, and USA using it all the time. Whereas in the UK, I mean, the weather, the weather is not consistent enough that you get there. I mean, what would people do a job, which we'll do as well, is you get hotter, and you put the hot tub in with a cover. And then you know that's good enough for some bandwidth. Turns out it's a really small body of water.

Heather Bicknell 9:36
Yeah, they were selling these like inflatable hot tubs on Amazon for a few 100 bucks and I don't know how good they were but I was tempted the other week. So the

Gerard McGovern 9:45
other one we use which is not bad. It's called the laziest bar. And you guessed we had a Las Vegas one which sees six people or something. And actually a friend of ours, they were we Morning got his recommendation, and he's had his wine for about five years now. We had ours for about three and then I got a damage the plastic. The whole thing is I wouldn't call it a

Heather Bicknell 10:18
flea,

Gerard McGovern 10:20
inflatable molded plastic. So you basically pump it up, then you pump it up inside a leather shell so that so the outside is there that that keeps that helps you keep the heat in. And then you've got the inflatable stuff in the middle and then you've got a motor that plugs onto it. Which gives you bubbles and does the filtration of water. We kept about three three and a half years that I don't know how it happened but I basically smashed it and then you have to repeat that it's almost impossible. We know we must repeat about 10 times in a month for what we spent on what what did they use was by another one we'll we'll we'll get away and then we came back on holiday we haven't been back since they're very popular you can get the the quite fancy. They'll have IoT stuff built in now so you can have your app that runs the thing because one of the biggest pains with it which I found is that you know when we had our first house it was in a shady spots, it never got warm. And you'd spend an absolute fortune of time and money warming the thing up with the heater. And then in our new house it's directing the sun from about 11 o'clock in the morning till eight or seven o'clock at night. So it always you know decent temperature. But the challenge is you don't unless you want that thing to run all night long heating because it doesn't need to you only need like three hours. So the apps the app looks quite good the schedules so that it can actually start up you know for him he can kick on and then it can warm it up for drops below a certain temperature it can warm it up to quite keen to to see where those go now. I just put the petroleum political lights and music kind of ties into your, your Spotify account, all that kind of stuff. That's really geeky. Yeah. But that's cool.

Heather Bicknell 12:16
Yeah. Meaning that you can get nowadays. Yeah, that song Oh, my IoT stuff is really cool as long as it works. But, you know, even like, our air filter has a dino we can get an app to say what its status is. It's just so useful. It's like so just setting a date on a calendar and having to remember and having that all integrated is so convenient. Yeah,

Gerard McGovern 12:45
as long as you might want to put on a separate network, that's that's, you know, worried about the insecurity of IoT.

Heather Bicknell 12:54
Just streaming, this speaking,

Gerard McGovern 12:56
phoning home all the time. Well, that's and you sort of get these guys pulled in so quickly. They don't think about security. I mean, remember, we had a chat with with loric ages ago. Or maybe it was episode we lost a contract. But but they were talking about how you know, so easy, so easy to build one, you know, just an IoT, whatever it is some sort of sensor, but they avoid things like encryption, or they'll phone back to China photo back to China and you don't know what they're sending. And in same token, you don't know what they'll what they'll receive. So you don't really want them on your main Wi Fi network, the junior you and your family are using you want them on a on a segregated Wi Fi. So I put my security cameras on a separate network, even though they're from a reputable well known provider.

Unknown Speaker 13:45
I just didn't want to take the resident if they got a breach, then my wife was breached My turn. Yeah.

Gerard McGovern 13:53
And even my smart lights the room, same thing. They're all on the same network. You know, something goes wrong. It's like, well, it doesn't matter. Too much to get that you can see what's on my cameras outside. A big deal. But if you if you think about like guys doing transactions today on the internet banking or something, and someone has managed to put us packets on IoT devices, IoT devices, actually pretty good storage, and pretty good. processing power. It needs to capture packets. You don't need much. And it's not encrypted properly. Then you've got a whole So yeah, that's

Heather Bicknell 14:37
for sure. Well, if you have some time, I can tell you about my iPhone, workday.

Gerard McGovern 14:44
Sure. Yeah. Tell me tell me I've got to toughen up.

Heather Bicknell 14:47
Okay, great. So um, yeah, so we've had you know, we did that episode ages ago about your experience working on an iPad all day. So I thought I would share my iPad. Phone example, scaled down even more. So I think it's important to consider the hardware when you're talking about working all day on a phone, both for screen size and just how much we charge does that hold. So I have an iPhone 11 Pro. So it's still pretty good on battery life. You know, screen size for me is pretty good. But it's not a max or something where it would have given me even more. So I think the first key that I learned if you're going to be stuck working on your phone all day, particularly if you're in a power outage, which was my situation is that you need some good battery packs. The ability to juice up frequently because working on your phone, especially off Wi Fi just drains it so quickly using I was using teams mostly, but my battery just tanked. And usually I can go more than a full day on a charge that was less than one. And, you know, lesson two is that I think if I had to go back and maybe restart my day, planning to work on my phone, let's say I was traveling or something, I probably would download more native apps. Because I was trying to get by mainly with calling in, which cannot be ideal if you can't find the you know, the right dialing number or if there's not one that you can, that has all of the you know, the pounds and the stars and the meeting codes embedded in it. So it's just a one click.

Gerard McGovern 16:50
And you talk about sorry, when you say who got into teams, because I find teams is especially bad at this.

Heather Bicknell 16:57
I actually I was dialing in to zooms because I had teams I could join for that.

Gerard McGovern 17:04
Okay, so the reason why teams are high barriers is unless you've got the calling plan associated with your account, you don't actually get the call in numbers for teams meeting.

Heather Bicknell 17:15
Yes, I actually I way back in the day, I had to ask it to get me I didn't have that. And then whenever I needed to make a meeting with someone external, and you know if they needed to dial in, especially when teams I think was less popular. A few people had it, it was just like kind of that inconvenience of here's my system for us to meet on. I was just embarrassed that I could even send people a number they could use if they didn't want to download teams. So they don't really they resolve that for me. So

Gerard McGovern 17:50
the second thing I find, which is frustrating. Maybe their members come on a map now is when you look at the meeting invite from teams, there's so many links, and they're not clean links. They're like just messy, you know, long things. Clicking on too sometimes I click on the wrong link, which is the link for managing the meeting several times I click on the link, which takes you to the page or the numbers. Yeah, I find it very clean. Anyway. So you're telling more about the native apps. So which which I actually think you need to have native?

Heather Bicknell 18:19
Why I think it probably would have downloaded zoom. And then I was kind of working off the browser for my office apps. I just it's not it's obviously my personal phone. So I haven't, you know, downloaded all that. I think if I downloaded the office app zoom, I would have been in a much better spot just for ease of transitioning between things starting to work day.

Gerard McGovern 18:47
Yeah, and one signal that you have a 3g signal or 4g signal.

Heather Bicknell 18:53
So yeah, it's funny. So my house was built in the late 1940s. post World War Two and there's a shortage of wood as a building material. So the outsides actually steel panels. So So signal inside the house is is poor, but it doesn't matter most of the time because I have Wi Fi. So I was working off of like one to two bars. So I kept going outside, especially for meetings just to get a better signal. So another pro tip would be if we're going to take outside meetings, wear sunscreen because I didn't because I was just as just trying to make it work, you know going in and out trying to find a signal. I was like I'll be outside you know, 30 minutes an hour for a call. I had I always wear SPF on my face but you know the sun was strong that day and got a little bit toasted on my arms got a bit of a farmer's tan now So that's fine. Yeah, that's a good lesson. There. I think if you're, you know, a knowledge worker, obviously, you think in a pinch, you can do a lot on a phone, at least answer emails and take meetings. I mean, I guess that's not shocking business folks have been doing that for quite some time. But even just, you know, working through teams, there's just a lot a lot you can do. But, you know, the more your meetings depend on things like screen share, think that was the biggest pain was zoom, actually, is I, the zooms I was on, people really wanted to share screen. Which at that point, it's like, your contribution and understanding of the meeting is super limited. If you can't see what's going on.

Gerard McGovern 20:56
The thing that I think about often now, when are you designing something is we've got everything you need to think about, someone's going to look at this on a mobile screen. Now, if you say, for example, sending an email, very rarely should you send an email that doesn't fit on his mobile screen, you know, some of them some more than five lines, per se. And having lots of attachments and pictures that I mean, there's other ways to do it that I've done, probably more beneficial. But, I mean, I do it sometimes as well, where I'm sitting downstairs, and I'm late for meetings, or coffee, whatever. So I'll start the meeting on my phone. Because that's the newest thing I've got with me, I got my headphones on, and I'll walk up the stairs to go join a fight off my device. And often that's when they show you something. And you sort of zooming in and you're looking

Heather Bicknell 21:47
at what's on the screen is

Gerard McGovern 21:49
lucky looking at zooming that you're actually not even listening to what they're saying. So, yeah, Hey, what about preparation? Yeah. I mean, I get sunburned a lot, because I go for walks during the day. So I'm guilty on that front, too. And why did you not connect your laptop to your phone is this because I already did battery was because you've been offline for two or three days,

Heather Bicknell 22:13
it was dead. And I enough, I might get my work laptop, I don't know if it can hold charge for an hour. So it was kind of just a non option.

Gerard McGovern 22:26
Which I found really funny. So it was your whole, your whole area down hole, and other

Heather Bicknell 22:34
not all of it, but a good portion of folks. Yeah. And your office didn't have a generator. So actually, I could have gone into the office. And I thought about it. But you know, I'd mentioned some family stuff that I was dealing with. So I had a family member who's in the hospital now. That wasn't motivated, but something else contagious. So I was like, and I'd been around her so I was like, well, it's not COVID I don't have COVID symptoms, I feel fine. But just like I'm like, is this a lesson from you know, being pandemic, that if I've been around someone who's something contagious, and we're sort of still learning about what they have, and they're not doing particularly well, I was like, I'll just not go in. Because Yeah, I wasn't the only one without power. So I know more people who are going in we're sort of on a bit of a hybrid model right now. So people are have the option to go into the office. But I decided that to not go in especially the first day that I worked on my phone. Yeah,

Gerard McGovern 23:44
that's fair as well. I mean, I think that's a good lesson we should what we should all learn from this pandemic is that rather than rather than isolate when you've got something then go in and be here. projection to do more damage than good often asking the question was, you know, potentially could have gone in and put the device into charger and I can think about the next morning but that's why we have the generator is just purely to show. I'll tell you a funny story. So we go down to my uncle's house in the mountains a couple weekends ago. And we go down on the Thursday because this is coming from COVID and my doctor sort of said get out of Germany for a bit because the blue sheets are bad and hockey language etc. So we dive down on the Thursday and we you know, get the afternoon and we had a normal sort of family night and the Friday we spent the whole day out and got a lot of devices for the kids i've you know obviously detain them in my you know my devices with me for my stuff. And we're sitting having dinner on the Friday night and the power goes out. Now we're in the middle of the mountains so there's no houses around, but there's not a lot so you go look outside and about on the on the balcony and you don't see a lot of lights. You think Daniel fader, everyone's out. This is dark, and you can just see the stars. And so you're going to be to say, well, they'll probably fix it in the morning. So, next morning, No, nothing's charged. So you know, all our devices that we've, you know, I've been charging devices with my laptop or my iPad, etc. So we've a little bit of power, but not much. So in the morning, we wake up, we might get a very fancy four by four. So we would start that up and basically start charging your devices off his car, you can take like 20 devices of his various connections, and whatever, because if he goes into the bush with his nothing, so he's got all the gadgets, he's got solar panels and light bulb on the truck, it's, you know, very fancy. So we start charging everything, and then all the girls go out for a walk. And then as assesses the house, we were playing with his drone, because that's what power and we're waiting for electrician to come. And we're waiting. And then we suddenly think, you know, we let's go check if anyone also got power. So he walks up to the White House, and they've got power. So it's only really possible fine. So he says, he's already checked, the circuit says everything's working, everything's working. So we're busy playing the drone, particularly the drone. Now, the other car been running for about an hour and a half, we obviously have minimal power lifter, the laptops and stuff to charge things, electrician rock surfaces. Can you guys reset the mains for like, Well, you know, he said he had, he says, No, you got to pull it down and push it out there work. So that's what we did. It was down in turn the switch back on. So we're planning for a whole day of no power going out the adventure packs to go charge things because, you know, you want to be in the middle of nowhere without cell reception and be able to call anybody in that. But in the end, it was just a simple switch that hadn't been turned the right way.

Heather Bicknell 26:48
I mean, for the for the better wish that had been our have been our case. But yeah, it's always nice fun. You know, just getting it back on last night, even though we've been out for so many days. At that point, it was a pleasant surprise, because I was not excited. I was like God another work another work day or two. And I said Thursday, I worked on my phone. Friday went to my sister's, she just moved, they didn't have anything set up on Thursday, Friday, we had their place has power. So we rolled to work from there on Wi Fi. But I was you know, my laptop was on a couple boxes. And I was like sitting on this little stool. And it was still very challenging workday, but much better than the one before it. But now I have the whole setup back. And I'm very grateful for it. And it just makes you Yeah, just really realized. I mean, a lot of it so much is just screen real estate, you know, a good Wi Fi connection. And screen real estate gets you pretty far

Gerard McGovern 27:53
out, I mean, I sometimes take my laptop downstairs and work off there. And I do it only if I want to look at something like singular, okay, I just want to read a document, do I just write something. But then when I know I'm going to need to be if I need to screens to to analyze something, whatever, their preferred carbs to establish it and stand. But in my office, it's quite cold, even though it's 25 degrees outside. So you know, like to get the warm. But I've been experimenting now with the iPad pros, you can use that as a second screen. And that actually works quite well because my wallet is just big enough that you put something on there and you can you can look at it but you can actually do the work on your laptop. So that's that's a nice lowball solution.

Heather Bicknell 28:43
Yeah, I've seen another. I don't remember the brand. But another kind of like, it looks like a tablet. But it's its function was just to be a second screen for your laptop. I feel like that. That sounds like something I saw on Instagram. I've seen it. Someone I knew had one that I saw not too long ago. But I don't Yeah, I don't remember the details of it. But it was essentially like the size of an iPad and just a second, you know, mobile monitor if you're working off a laptop,

Gerard McGovern 29:22
because often all you want, like I was doing some work on an iPad, set up a VPN. And all you want to do all I wanted was the article that I was looking at on the second screen so that we'll have to keep switching between the two. Which you don't need much. I mean, this is an 11 inch thick enough. Well, I have to say after using this as living for a long time. I am kidding in the bigger one. Going is slightly better. But we'll see where this all goes.

Heather Bicknell 29:51
Yeah. Well, unfortunately this week's episode is delayed but I'll get it up. I'll edit one Didn't get it up today. Maybe this time we'll see

Gerard McGovern 30:06
what do we discuss a couple weeks ago we've been a couple in the background that you've already done just in case

Heather Bicknell 30:12
yes yes I it's just been a really crazy busy couple of months here with moving house and work and everything so

Gerard McGovern 30:21
I don't totally understand what about obviously giving you

Unknown Speaker 30:26
But yeah,

Gerard McGovern 30:29
this is you know these these situations you can always look at them to go you know, if only I planned better or Hadn't you know, pre pre set up a few things just in case

Heather Bicknell 30:43
Yeah, well like I told you I've never been this is the longest of my you know, longest power outage of my life so I was not adequately prepared for that many days we had water you know, if we hadn't we had city water so when I was growing up we had well water so power going out was a bigger issue in that regard.

Gerard McGovern 31:07
So well have you with us you know, even in the book The issue here was a man that powered off you know, none of the GIS is filled up so we had no hot water the next morning for showers the issue was several homes while we were water generator is you know with my daughter and that if she needs a bottle we need hot water and you can put you know when you know what's going to happen so that we have an app that tells us where we'd have loadshedding so you can sort of plan for it so we'll we will sit there for like an hour before the power goes out. Filling up flasks and boiling water and and cooking dinner and all that kind of stuff. But sometimes you don't have that we had a we had one situation where it went off on the third like he just went off on a Thursday afternoon. I was supposed to go the Friday afternoon and we had planned anything and then you running around trying to get what you can from those that do have power is a little bit prepared for the line

Heather Bicknell 32:13
yeah yeah, it's uh yeah, they were like they set up a power station at one of the high schools so if you know there are always options for well that's pretty good. Yeah, at least around here for things that if we needed those resources would have been we could have sought them out. But yeah, we have a natural gas hot water heater So actually, which is super old it's actually past its expected lifespan so it could die on us any time it needs to be replaced but it was actually nice because we had we still had hot water so I don't know now I'm like well do we want to if we replaced it with electric then we wouldn't have had hot water and we also have a gas stove so we are able to use that and we want to get induction so

Gerard McGovern 33:12
yeah so it's interesting a lot of guys have moved to guess where they can because of you know environment infrastructural issues in order to be too reliant on on Eskom here so people can where they got the power because I guess in some areas are still available with the pipes etc that say we were in the UK we house we've got now is just not a guess. For for the hobbits certainly induction and this house here we are now also as induction buses that I prefer induction to guests from cooking point of view. So I guess you gotta weigh up your options to what you want, but that's also quite a hefty thing to change. So that's another factor.

Heather Bicknell 34:03
Yeah, I think it'll be worth it long term but not not something that I'm going out to switch tomorrow. I was Yeah, that was I was great. I was grateful that it was a pleasant surprise just with you know, that all I really lost out on was Wi Fi and then yeah, charging things so

Gerard McGovern 34:31
well, believe it or not, is like losing water. Yeah, that's your that's your job. And in a lot of senses, I mean, you know, we the reason why we've invested so much is that I can't afford not to be alone. Communism power failure, while I still say internet connection still stays live so I can still use it. So we just spent the money to to make sure we can survive. I mean, because my mirrors sort of working place is a good half an hour 40 minutes drive away. So it's not, it's not like it's easy to get somewhere else to carry on working. So. But that's what happened to us. So that's it.

Heather Bicknell 35:12
Yeah, fingers crossed there. Cool. Anything else want to cover? Since we're here? Now, I think that encapsulates that experience, hopefully don't have to put my phone to the test as a solo device again anytime soon. But it did Oh, it kept it. It allowed me to work that day. And I if I hadn't had that, you know, I wouldn't have been able to so

Gerard McGovern 35:42
well, I think it's something that I was quite shocked at the situation, the mountains that all my devices that I could use as a banshee where I was able to use the battery so I can plug in my iPad. Well, I use that as a battery to charge the more critical devices and tools, the phones. So let's say for the laptops or critical device was the phones and iPads, etc. And then when power came when you can always recharge the bigger the bigger batteries. So you got to have some sort of cable strategy as well, I guess. Yeah. What do you go

Heather Bicknell 36:19
yet? That won't hurt to be prepared?

Unknown Speaker 36:24
Sure. So

Gerard McGovern 36:29
Okey doke. So it's good to catch up. And we still we still have to chat about those other two things that we talked about. The third working place, and Mozilla was hosted

Heather Bicknell 36:42
with Windows 365. Yep.

Gerard McGovern 36:46
Yes, I was trying to get on the trial, but the trials already full. But we will probably do a trial guys working for us that are nearby to locations. I think I'm actually quite excited for that. I know that sounds counterintuitive, because I really liked the Windows operating system. But I was excited for the host of desktop.

Heather Bicknell 37:08
Yeah, I'm interested to see how you get on with it. Because it's got a lot of the same advantages of wV D, but just bear aivd. But he just simpler to be up and running and manage, it seems like so

Gerard McGovern 37:27
if you can pay renting a machine for a period of four for three years, versus buying a laptop, you know, the same sort of spec, you're spending more money on the house. But I'm hoping that the experience is that much better for the user and less maintain a maintenance requirement for the IT support people. And I took mine into account with having two machines and turn them and this one, what each way. And it's a little expensive than that. But doesn't say how can you get the benefit of the maintainability. Also, if you if you're not using the machine, you switch it off for a month you get the money back, I was on questions I lost. And I really got clarity on that without losing the image. Yeah, well, you shouldn't in theory, but that's a longer discussion.

Heather Bicknell 38:22
How long can you have it off for? But yeah,

Gerard McGovern 38:26
so you're paying, you're paying a monthly fee. So I think the entry level one was about 30 pounds. However the spec was, but in essence, you painted a once off fee for the month. So when you turn it off and on for the whole month doesn't matter. With if you're doing that with Azure Windows desktop, that's resource related. So if you've got machines going up and down, and you'll see probiotics and the ups and downs you believe as well. Where we this got interesting is you might have a seasonal thing, we're going to bring six people on during the dedication season, you can set up six machines, use them for six months, and then take them offline when they leave. And then you don't have to worry about the six laptops you just bought, which is our situation, we hired a whole lot of people in the UK, which we don't have anymore, we move that off to other countries. And now that people use their own devices, which opens up another security pane. So we've had to put in cheat on all of them lock them down exemption so that those personal devices become sort of hybrid devices. You know, we managed by us, but it's still the device while it worked for us. But now, if I get the web stuff for the windows Six, five stuff working that I can say, you know, you don't need a person to ask and we'll just log into this machine as they're in theory. And yeah, when you when you leave If we just disable the machine, you know, take it off offline and keep an image of it. I'm excited from that, from those sorts of points of view, I really think it'll help secure the environment and provide a better working experience.

Heather Bicknell 40:18
Yeah, I mean, even if you just lost your device, it wouldn't be such a dire situation. So

Gerard McGovern 40:27
what. So when we, when we did it with one of the banks, that was one of the biggest we call it business case, is one summer saving money. It was daily protection, it was removing, you know, investment bankers and the like, carry laptops around and using them while they were traveling. Also, you know, it is the maintenance thing as well supporting that device, the minute someone's traveling and they've got a problem, that device, then you get someone's got to help them something might have got to them, it just creates a lot of pain. And we had all sorts of fancy tools for like setting up a VPN to run them and then connect through outside and then having a self help thing on the device. But you still have someone is not comfortable with that. And this led to phone in and like I see. So having a virtual device that they used to connect in from Anyway, you know, a lot of sense. And then you can also roll out new bolts quite quickly with with patching, etc. So there's a lot of pros to it. But not all of its financially pros. Some of its more expensive, directly, you can see the cost of it. Whereas when you have laptops in there floating around, the cost of the user not being productive on there is a lot easier to hide. Because they get not affected, but they're effective or else and they also let you monitoring them. They're also good in some senses. Yeah. And a lot of companies don't monitor to the level that that you don't know what's possible, so they only know what they don't learn.

Heather Bicknell 42:08
Yeah, definitely a lot of guessing what the experience is really like in the environment. Alrighty, thanks. It's good to catch up. Yeah. Talk to you next week.

Unknown Speaker 42:25
Yeah,

Heather Bicknell 42:26
go do that I agree. By All right.

Ryan Purvis 42:33
Thank you for listening today's episode of The Big Nose our producer, editor. Thank you, Heather. for your hard work for this episode. Please subscribe to the series and rate us on iTunes or the Google Play Store. Follow us on Twitter at the DW w podcast. The show notes and transcripts will be available on the website WWW dot digital workspace that works. Please also visit our website www dot digital workspace that works and subscribe to our newsletter. And lastly, if you found this episode useful, please share with your friends or colleagues.

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