Corporate Sales Guy

I had a great opportunity last week to get a very quiet hour to work uninterrupted when I found myself outside of a clients office 1 hour earlier than our scheduled time to meet. As I’ve mentioned- at work it’s Windows XP. At home for all my personal stuff (political work, community service, home movies and photography) it’s a Mac that I use.

Of course, there’s a Starbucks outside the clients office and I get free internet for 2 hours per day because I have a Starbucks card. I grab an iced coffee and fire up the corporate PC and here’s how the hour unfolds:

1. Wait 2 minutes for my very new/modern corporate laptop to boot
2. Wait 1 more minute for all the security stuff to load up (NAC etc)
3. Wait about 4 minutes for Firefox load because there’s some extension update and since I am not authenticated via At&t’s WiFi it’s not having great success getting updates.
4. Firefox boots up and my starbucks creds have been forgotten by my 3rd party app that saves my passwords.
5. I reset my password and only receive it because I have my iPhone with me.
6. I want to Pop in the password and I think I am on my way but now I getting molassas performance on firefox, can’t get to Starbucks landing page to enter new password.
7. Decide to reboot, wait 3 minutes before I get response from XP.
8. Same thing happens again, of course the temp password I got is no longer on the clipboard and it was a weird combo that I couldn’t remember.
9. Had to reset password again
10. Login in, firefox still dragging.
11. Try to use explorer, loads up quickly but won’t find AT&T landing page to allow login.
12. Firefox finally gets up and running, finds landing page.
13. I fire up my VPN client which connects
14. Start outlook and watch it try to sync all my emails which takes another 3 minutes since I’d been out of the office for 2-3 hours.

I’ve eaten up 40 minutes screwing with this, I need to now pack and get over to my clients site, didn’t get any of the to-do’s off my list knocked out during this period.

Had I attempted this with my mac:

1. Wouldn’t have needed to boot up. The mac wakes up from sleep so nicely that I rarely turn the thing off. I usually reboot it once a month just for preventative maintenance.

2. Safari would have grabbed the Starbucks landing page almost immediately.

3. I would have pushed my credentials via 1Password after putting in my master password (only once per session).

4. Fire up Apple Mail and I would have been set. This would have probably have all taken about 1 minute.

If I needed a VPN to get to my email, I have a VPN client made by Apani which is very quick to fire up. This would have added about 10 more seconds.

Any other users out there trapped in the land of corporate windows? Between dual factor authentication, NAC checking your every move and bloated anti-virus software its hard to get work done on the road. To the credit of my IT department these things aren’t an issue when in the cube farm with a direct Ethernet connection. But we’re in sales, what the heck are we doing in the office? (Unless you’re inside sales – which is a great place to be too).