Working from home?

Having to support client testing for a couple of weeks (ending yesterday), I was to work in some weird timings – 4:30 PM to 12:30 AM. Truly speaking, this suits me quite well, for a host of reasons - I don’t have to kill myself by trying to get up at 7, I don’t have to try to go to work early, I don’t have to travel indefinitely to reach office… and so on. But never in my dreams did I think working from home would be so challenging. The first challenge I had to face was, of course, the BSNL broadband connection I have at home. Awesome, to put it in one word. I only had to login. The logging out was automatically taken care of by BSNL, disconnecting at will every 10 mins. Struggling with the connection for several hours yesterday, my emotions ranging from pure fury to extreme despair, I experienced it all. Having been outsmarted by BSNL every time, I decided to prove I could do it, too, and I logged out myself! Ha!! <evil laughter> Whenever BSNL was busy disconnecting someone else’s connection and let me be, for say 30 mins at a stretch, TNEB took over the responsibility. Every night, promptly, there is an electricity failure - usually lasting under 5 minutes and sometimes over 15 mins. Sweet. And whenever, by a freak coincidence, BSNL and TNEB did let me work undisturbed, VPN entered the fray, apparently, trying to prove that it was equally adept at disconnecting. Once dc, even though the broadband connection was just fine (surprisingly!), VPN refused to let me log back on, saying that the ‘Remote peer is not responding’. Nice. Ultimately, when fate managed to keep all the conspirators at bay and I had finally logged onto VPN and was actually working/talking to D on the official messenger Jabber, I suddenly realized that there was no response from D. Ah.. well, you guessed right - Jabber’s turn. *shrug* But Jabber was not as relentless as the others, it let me log right back in, though I missed several msgs in the process… *sigh* Last night was particularly bad. I think I got disconnected at least 20 times…. Ummm, actually, you could actually make that 25, and I’ll give you the benefit of doubt. *sigh* D and I were discussing about assigning a piece of work to one of the team members… (or rather, we were trying to discuss it but fate willed otherwise). I got dc so many times and she kept trying to copy/paste her previous msgs every time, that she finally lost patience, and refused to copy/paste her previous msgs. Hmph!! Well, the Airtel representative came over to my place a short while ago. I decided I have had enough and am switching connections... Please tell me Airtel isn’t half as bad.