A Hitchhiker's Guide To The Internet

"Where do you work?"

"Planet Earth."

Sound familiar? No? Well, it should. More and more people are working from home on the Internet, and there are two things you should know about your office when you work on the Internet.

First, your office will be very, very small and very, very lonely, as I chronicled in my hermit trilogy at http://www.thehappyguy.com/hermit.html .

Second, your office will be very, very big and full of many, many people from every corner of the planet, mostly trying to sell things to each other. That is because when you work from home, Planet Earth is your office...and theirs, too.

For instance, would you believe that a man in the Ukraine delivers the local weather forecast from Sydney to Chicago through his website at http://www.weather4you.info ? So much for sticking your head out the window.

I have a client in the UK who sells ball bearings through his site at http://www.gm-exports.com to every country in the world ... except the UK, of course. Doesn't that make the local hardware store redundant?

Office Politics in the Global Office

My clients live on almost every continent, and the only thing that occasionally gets in the way of seamless communication are time-zone differences. (If Columbus would have minded his own business, we wouldn't face even that challenge!)

What's more, my clients are not always English-speaking, and neither are all of my clients' websites. Can you say netzwerküberwachungservice? I do search engine optimization in four languages - English, French, Spanish and German - which tells you something about the global office in which some of my clients sit.

But there is more than just language that makes the global office a tricky workplace to navigate. Aside from the lack of water coolers and washrooms, most of the world works in metric, but the biggest Internet market works in imperial. So some customers won't know what a mile is, and others won't know what a kilometer is.

And everybody spells funny to someone else. Is it honor or honour? Center or centre? Folks or peeps?

Fortunately for me, I live in Canada. 95% of Canadians live within a stone's throw of the US - continued below ...