Back in Laptopistan

At Port City Java in Capitol Hill today, just up the street from Peregrine, where I was last week, and there's a fair concentration of laptop users, but certainly not the packed house that there was at Peregrine. I'm guessing that's correlated to Port City's 3 stars on Yelp vs Peregrine's 4. But the WiFi is fast and there are some comfy chairs. Judgement on coffee still forthcoming.

One of the difficulties of working remotely in a shared environment is phone calls. I had a meeting today which is often cancelled, so I was hoping that it would be again today. But it wasn't, so I had to fire up Skype (which, thankfully, worked fine here), dial up the conference line, and participate in the call, wincing every time I had to speak from fear of offending the people around me. Fortunately, there was only one other person besides my girlfriend sitting nearby, so I wasn't as concerned as I would have been, but in a tighter space like Peregrine, it would be impossible to take a phone call without bothering people. The alternative would be to go outside or sit in one's car, both of which I've done in the past, but it's below freezing outside and my car is more than a block away, making neither of those options particularly palatable.

I suppose that in a true co-working space, phone calls would be expected and unavoidable, so both my concern and others' irritation would be lower. But I have yet to identify a suitable co-working facility in DC, and it's nice to get to change scenery each time I go to a new cafe, so for now I'll just live with the minor difficulties and keep hunting for the best WiFi and coffee.