Traveler Blues

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

 

Being an IT consultant is not all what’s it cracked up to be.

If you are a loner and are getting well paid to eat out and are able to afford great accommodations and other perks, then bully for you! Business-class flights to exotic locales and room service grub that makes your personal trainer cringe may be possible for a small segment of the population, but chances are you don’t live that kind of lifestyle and are instead very dependent upon your professional skills to get you through the days, months or even years as you put your own touches on each project.

Unless you can afford an assistant, you have to go through the same slog-fest that others do. That means booking flights and cars, making connections in all sorts of weather and conditions out of your control, dealing with security issues at airports (not to mention the ones you might run when going into a new employer site), etc. It also means lots of expenses and receipts and filing of paperwork to make sure you get appropriately compensated--or keep for later access when it’s time for taxes to be filed.

It’s having various tech devices for personal and work use, including having the wherewithal for keeping backups of some form or another, either in encrypted media or cloud form. It’s also trying to compress the lifestyle of your immediate self into something you can carry or…

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