Working and training from home

Abstract

Due to a serious illness of a family member, I recently needed to perform a large percentage of my normal work duties from home. These included the easy things like reports, e-mail, and documentation. The more difficult tasks were attending meetings, held sometimes in rooms with very little technology, and training. During training I needed to see what the student was doing on their computer, as well as being able to demonstrate on a large screen projection system in the same room. In addition to the technical challenges, the needs of the family members at home had to be balanced with work, sometimes both needs were concurrent. As some of us who are staring retirement age in the face, but still working, the need to balance care for a family member and work pulls at us from both sides. In this paper I will concentrate on the technical challenges, but I will also share some of the family issues that I encountered as well.