There is a big computer company in the countryside in Germany. There is not much in the surroundings of the company except some vineyards on the hills, a few fields and, on one side, a forest. The buildings of the company are on a plain, where the land is absolutely flat, and the forest is absolutely flat as well, neatly divided into polygons by paths for bikes, pedestrians and horses. There is also, as there should be in every well organised forest, a pond, where visitors can take a bath, if they find their way so far into the forest.
Some years ago it was suddenly popular with remote working. Instead of paying for expensive office space, companies let people work from home, using a modem to access the company computer. The company didn't have to pay for office space. The staff didn't have to conform to any strict dress code, but could work as they liked in shorts or their pyjamas, if they liked to. There were plenty of advantages, and only one drawback: No work was carried out, as no informal meetings took place in the corridors, and no vital, but unofficial, information was whispered at coffee breaks. To let
all communication go through the formal channels of mail and discussion databases didn't turn out to be productive at all. Nowadays people are mostly back at their work place.
This summer has been exceptionally hot in Germany. The big computer company in the German countryside has, like a lot of other big German companies, not understood that air-conditioning is necessary to keep heat down in the summer. Therefore it's so hot in the offices, that it would disturb even a desert scorpion. The employees realise that their working place is not a productive working place, and most of them have taken their portable computers and their mobile phones and gone out in the forest.
If you come to that forest during working hours, it looks like any other forest at a first glance, but walking a few hundred yards into it, you're very likely to hear or see people sitting leaning their backs at a comfortable tree trunk, their bare legs gently stretched out in the grass and a laptop on their lap, writing important computer programs, that will change the world. Some of them stroll around in the shade under an oak tree with their portable phones, having a telephone conference with some of their colleagues at the branch in Los Angeles. Around a picnic table, there are five persons discussing the model of a new database, one of them making drafts in the sand with his left foot.
This is not a paper less office. Some people carry their document portfolios, and at the lake some people sit with their feet in the water and a portable printer server connected with a modem and a mobile phone to the network of the main building. To the portable printer server, there is a portable printer connected. The speed and quality of the print-out is of course not as good as it would be at one of the big laser-printers in the main building, but it's good enough for temporary drafts.
I am making this up. There is no such forest, that I have seen anyhow, and it would be a quite horrible place to be for both visitors and animals, if it was crowded by high-tech electronics. It would be a quite horrible place for the computer engineers as well, with all the insects, especially the ants under the birches on the Southern shore of the lake, you know. But better than the company's own buildings in the middle of the summer.
3 October 1998