#HTE

Working From Home, Spouse Driving You Nuts? Turn Your Car Into a Private Office

With both you and your spouse working from home, tempers can fray, particularly if you have limited space and different working styles. Maybe one partner needs total silence while the other’s job involves yapping on the phone. What millions of people may be overlooking is that they unwittingly have an unused satellite office sitting in their driveway.

Don’t get me wrong: While we’ve all seen images of common road-warrior set-ups…

…I’m not advocating those. Typing from the driver’s seat while angling your body towards a laptop on the passenger side is agony. There are laptop trays that mount on the steering wheel…

…but you’ve still got the pedals in the way of your feet. Also, driver’s seats are typically more cramped than the seating in the back.

Which is what I’m getting at. Those systems above are all designed for people who have to drive, stop, do some work, drive, stop, rinse-and-repeat, so they’re sitting in the driver’s seat.

No-Driving-Needed Advantages

Since you are probably in lockdown and don’t need to drive anywhere, you have some car-office-set-up luxuries that true road warriors don’t. For example:

1. You have the luxury of using the back seat.

You can pretend you’re some chauffeured business magnate (assuming you’ve got the legroom back there). You don’t have the steering wheel in your way and you don’t have to type in a diagonal position, but can put the laptop right in front of you.

2. You don’t need to worry about power adapters.

Since the car’s not going anywhere, you can run an extension cord. But even if you can’t, you’re going to want to get out of the car every so often for a stretching break or to eat, and you can juice your laptop up during those breaks.

3. You don’t need to worry about a printer.

Unless you print all the time, the driveway is close enough to the house that you can run inside whenever you need to print and take a little break.

4. You don’t have to rely on cell service.

Assuming your WiFi router is close enough to the driveway, you can download large files at speeds unimaginable on the road.

And while your car probably doesn’t offer this level of luxury…

…and you may not be able to currently buy the back seat laptop trays anywhere, I’m thinking it shouldn’t be hard to DIY something.

In fact, here’s an Instructable.

Happy non-motoring!