Control Group Blog

Outside My Hotel in Malaysia – Do Not Feed The Monkeys!

I know the last time I posted here I said I’d be following up with another technical post, but instead I thought I’d share an experience I just had as I took a last minute trip for a client.

Normally if I take a trip it’s no big deal. I can write a blog post from where ever I go. My email is online, this blog is online, if I need to access something in my office I can just use our VPN to get connected. To use any of these I’d just need to have an Internet connection. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case when last week I went to a fairly remote part of Malaysia.

A few coworkers and I were trying to make last minute adjustments to a product that one of our clients is launching. At first I wondered why even send us out there when we can get remote access or talk someone through it on the phone. When I arrived onsite I realized why this wasn’t an option — getting connected is near impossible there. We could head to a coffee shop and get some free WiFi, but with over twenty hops to servers in the United States and a twelve hour time difference, getting anything done was difficult.

The lack of connectivity was challenging. One of my responsibilities was interfacing with the local IT department and writing some scripts to integrate the client’s system with existing systems and processes. I quickly realized how much I depend on online references and documentation. When you can barely get connected to look up the answer to a question about syntax you really have to use your head. Not to mention, each software build for the project is about 300 megabytes and getting this from our office in New York was difficult and time consuming.

The idea of ubiquitous Internet connectivity is something that we take for granted. As connection speeds get faster and more reliable we lose efficiencies that we once had. I learned that the Internet is really an extension of my knowledge and a valuable tool that I need to do my job. Being cut off from it was an interesting and overall positive experience. Solving every problem by thinking and working it through was difficult and took more time, but genuinely figuring things out for myself was very rewarding.

Towards the end of my time there we found a cell phone store that sold GSM modems and prepaid 3G SIM cards that allowed us to get connectivity. While this does make the job a lot easier, I’m glad I had the experience of being mostly cut off from the rest of the net — something that will surely happen less often as the world becomes better connected.