26 April 2010

Last week I was "stuck" in France because of the eruption of Eyjafjallajoekull in Iceland. Note I emphasise stuck because it was no great hardship to spend an extra 3 days in the fantastic countryside of south west France and spend some more time in great company. However when you are running a small business you have to keep your eye on the ball and keep pushing otherwise things can unravel pretty quickly.

So what to do? As soon as I knew I would not be getting back to the UK I contacted my office. Most of our systems are either hosted online or remotely accessible from anywhere. It's great to be able to work from anywhere as we found out in the recent snow crisis. But this time I had a new challenge. I did not have my IP phone with me and I had a conference call to attend on the Tuesday. I did not want to incur big costs phoning with my mobile or using my host's landline.

So Positive Computing swung into action for me as we do for our customers. Within an hour I had the software and licence required to run a soft-phone on our own phone system. Using my hosts PC I was able to make calls as if I was in Reading (that confused some people I will tell you!!). I was able to attend the conference call with no problem at all and then able to work pretty much as if I was in the office for the rest of my stay in France.

So I think what Eyjafjallajoekull has taught us is that we cannot prepare for everything, but if you have flexibility in your IT and telephony provision then most things are possible with a little application of knowledge and experience. I was very proud of my guys and now I know just how our customers (they tell me) feel in a crisis. My extra 3 days in France truly where hassle free.