Vacation

Your business is booming, you've been putting in 18-hour days, your customers are all more than satisfied and your prospects can't wait to buy your stuff. You need a vacation.

Of course, you can't take a vacation because you're getting 143 e-mails a day - well, 89 without the spam - and if you leave the office for two hours you've got fifteen messages, all urgent. Who is going to take care of the customers who are relying on you?

First of all, your vacation is going to have to be a working vacation - take a laptop along. If you're that busy and that indispensable, you should be making enough money to afford a good one. There are worse things than sitting on the balcony of your beachfront hotel room tapping out a quick e-mail while sipping a pina colada. Then there are a couple of other tools you need.

Unless you got your answering machine at the local dollar store, it will have a feature where it rings, say, twice before answering if it has messages and, say, four times if it doesn't when you call in for your messages. That way, if it rings a third time, there are no messages, you hang up and don't get a long distance charge. But your key tool is e-mail.

If you've set up your Internet presence properly, you've sprung for the US $100 to register your site name. The site itself can cost as little as US $5.95 a month with pair.com. A POP e-mail box will cost another US $1 per month with them. The advantage of this set-up is that you can access your e-mail from anywhere in the world under your own registered name, just as if you were at home. You just use any local service to log on and name your site as the POP server. Put in your usual user name and password and you've got your e-mail on your laptop. If you really want to get fancy, subscribe to CompuServe at their least expensive plan. For US $9.95 per month you've got access to the Internet from almost anywhere and, at home, you have a back-up service for when, not if, your local ISP has problems.

So, here you are, hundreds if not thousands of miles away from home, taking care of your customers by e-mail. I have used exactly this system to run my Montreal business from Myrtle Beach. I'm going on vacation tomorrow and, this time, I'll be out of touch. There are no phone jacks in the wilds of the Rideau Lakes south of Ottawa where we'll be camping. I guess I'm not indispensable enough.

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