Weekend versus weekday

It’s Saturday. But when you are a professional wfh-er (work from home), it hardly matters. Times of the day don’t matter either. In my case, there are roughly three ‘times of the day’ that punctuate work: Lunch, Tea and Dinner. Of course I sleep, but that’s not a break from work at most times!

Like with most people involved in technology writing or the Internet as a medium, I have an extensive RSS feed list to keep on top of. At last count, there were close to 180 feeds I follow everyday ranging from Cricket, Formula 1, Technology, News and what not! There’s a couple of cartoon feeds too! So every time my beloved Shrook, the RSS reader, goes ‘ping’, I need to rush over. Drop whatever I’m doing and run. (It is just for this that I am contemplating getting an iPhone when it does become available.) But today being Saturday, it’s been a rather slow day.

As with most weekends or holidays, the Internet service reliability is inversely proportional to the number of people at home. And having already chronicled the quality of service (or lack thereof) that my ISP in Bangalore, Hathway, provides, you will not get a prize for guessing that today was one of the bad days. Today’s connectivity reminded me of the way someone learns to drive. Stop-Start-Stop-Start. So every five minutes, the connection would die. I would wait, twiddle thumbs, get the occasional drink of water, return in time to hit “Refresh” for the mail, web pages, RSS feeds and everything else I was working on. And then rinse, repeat…

Now the trouble began when I took a while to realise that the volume of posts by people may be less today since it is Saturday. So what if I have no life beyond the computer. Others surely must, I thought. And as it turns out, they do. So as I grappled to come to terms with whether it was the connection that was down or if there were no more feeds to download, I decided to check my mailboxes, clean them, organise them, run rules, create some more and well, do the ‘organisation’ thing! So I did.

Had this been a regular weekday, I would still have been mowing my way through the various feeds and posts trying to get a grip on life. Looking for the latest to upload on to Daily Connect and research for my next article for a magazine (details in due course). Of course, news was slow today but a review was put up on Daily Connect. (Do let me know how you like it).

So as the Saturday proceeded slowly, I lived off my Reliance NetConnect for Internet (Hatway still acting up as I write this) and think I have had enough for the week. I have a rather long week coming up ahead including plans for packing and moving, planning for the aforementioned article and submitting a range of other assignments. And then there’s Daily Connect and some new proposals that are to be sent out. Why am I going on about this? … Right-o then. If you want to share your weekend details, feel free to do so. I’m off to have some dhokla now!

Have a good weekend.

Tags: Weekend, weekday, Bangalore, Internet, RSS feeds, iPhone, Mail, organising, working from home