When work is life but you can do it from anywhere thanks to RoamFree Ninja.
It’s never been easy for me to break away from working at my desk. Sure, I head to my local cafe after meetings in town to take care of emails, or if I must write about a sporting event from a pub, I will. But generally, I don’t spend more than an hour with my laptop away from my desktop, and as you can imagine, being persuaded to work from a boat for two days was not an easy sell.
My Croatian cousin who lives in Chicago called me a few weeks ago to let me know that he is coming to Croatia in a week for a short trip.
“I’ve rented a catamaran for a week, we have an open cabin for you, you have to come.”
The first thing that went through my head was “there is no way I can be away from work for a week” – especially now that we are in the peak summer season. I racked my brain to think about how exactly I could swing it.
“If I go from Sunday to Tuesday morning, I can get things covered and I’m gone for less than 48 hours.”
That sounded manageable.
I called my cousin back to tell him I’d join for the first part of the trip under one condition: I’d have to do some work.
“That’s fine,” he said – “do you have a hotspot?”
I didn’t, and using the personal hotspot on my mobile phone would only get me so far. There must be WiFi on the boat, I thought, right? Wrong.
But then a lightbulb sparked and I remembered my TCN colleague’s article about using a Croatian hotspot at sea – for a week! RoamFree Ninja would have to come to the rescue.
I called my colleague asking to borrow the device for a few days, but not before asking how good it really was.
“Oh, you’ll be fine. We used it all summer long up and down the Dalmatian coast!”
But could it download the World Cup photos I’m receiving from our reporter in Russia? Could it handle my large files? Could it load every webpage?
For some reason, I still wasn’t convinced, but I knew it was my only option. I took the risk.
Off I went with my cousin and his friends on the catamaran on Sunday morning, with my laptop and Ninja in tow. Our first stop on the sail would be Hvar – a town infamous for weak (or not working at all) WiFi.
Just to be sure, I thought I’d test out the Ninja when we were about 45 minutes away from parking at the Hvar town Riva.
“Ninja switched on, RoamFree connected on my laptop, here goes.”
I had full bars. And it was fast.
“Okay then… I might as well do whatever work I can now while I have WiFi because I’m sure the signal won’t be this strong anywhere else.”
So I worked, and the signal remained as strong the entire time.
Once we parked in Hvar town, we set off for a swim and lunch. Upon our arrival back to the boat, I decided to hop on again to check some emails. Still strong.
“Well, the real test will be on Monday when I have to get a lot of work done and write articles,” I thought.
Monday morning came and we decided to sail to Bol on the island of Brač. I set up my workstation on the back deck of the boat to enjoy the experience as much as possible.
“Laptop and Ninja fully charged, coffee in hand, let’s give it a go… “
That day, I was able to write 3 articles, edit 10 articles, post things to Facebook, chat, download massive photo files, and, essentially, work as normal from the comfort of a boat.
Thanks to RoamFree Ninja, I was able to escape a crowded Split and work away on the islands for a day. Now I know that thanks to RoamFree Ninja, I can work from anywhere.
