Collaboration during evacuation!

January 11, 2013 1 Comment

Central Desktop HQ experienced a little unscheduled excitement this week, after a mysterious odor elsewhere in the building led to a full-office evacuation and a phalanx of fire trucks surrounding our block. Some of our neighbors are biotech labs, so a mysterious odor is a little more alarming than the usual “who left the egg salad in the fridge?” sort of thing. I’m happy to report that everything turned out totally fine. For a while, though, our office was off-limits, so many of your faithful Central Desktop crew members took their show on the road – or just back to their homes. After all, our product is designed to help you work and collaborate from anywhere at any time. We’ve written about the value of working remotely, for employees and employers alike. This was a good chance for us to walk the walk (thanks, mysterious odor!).

Before everyone even finished exiting the building, our senior agency consultant, Sam, was back online and nonchalantly working away at his makeshift mobile desk. Our, ahem, award-winning support team retreated to their homes but returned to the SocialBridge cloud, where Kevin, our product support manager, led a live chat about API use and workplace templates from his couch. Habib barely had any downtime before getting back to his support tools, fresh tea in hand. Mark, their fearless leader, used the Central Desktop app to stay on top of any events that arose.

Scott, our sales director, was already working remotely when he heard the news. “By posting updates in the discussion thread, I was able to stay up to date with the happenings in our main office 350 miles away immediately,” he said. “No work was interrupted since all our data lives in the cloud and we were still able to get our tasks and proposals out to clients as needed without any delay.”

My own work for the afternoon was pretty straightforward: tidying up a post on running better meetings and working on a case study. Even so, a year ago I would have likely saved my in-progress work locally, then been out of luck if I hadn’t had time to grab my laptop or email myself the documents in the midst of an evacuation order. Thanks to SocialBridge, I had all of my work and all of my supplemental material waiting for me in the cloud. Changing devices and locations unexpectedly wasn’t even a minor inconvenience.

Of course, there used to be a time when unexpectedly losing access to your office, desk and computer could have caused the work equivalent of a snow day. Sorry about that.

And finally: we’ve read enough comic books to understand that our proximity to laboratories all but begs a mishap that leads to a mutated supervillain who would become the sworn arch-nemesis of our very own Collaboration Defender. It’s a risk we’re willing to take. We’ll see what happens…

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Adam McKibbin

Adam McKibbin is Central Desktop's Content Marketing Manager. He's previously served in editorial, community and social media management roles for startups and major media companies alike. His writing has appeared in numerous publications and websites, including the Chicago Tribune, Paste, The Nation and Metromix.