We’ve been talking about bedouin workers for a while now, but a recent interview on webmonkey
with two mega-bedouins simply made us smile. After their lease ran up,
Pittsburgh web designers Nathan Swartz and Olivia Meiring, along with
their 7-year-old son Tristan, donated most of their stuff to Goodwill,
bought an RV and hit the road for a year long road trip - maintaining
freelance design gigs and home schooling their child along the way.
Webmonkey: What did you have to do at home in
Pittsburgh to get ready for this trip? What happened to where you live
and where’s your mail going?
Swartz: Well, we had to save up a nice chunk of
cash, since between my credit and the state of the economy, we weren’t
exactly going to get a car loan for the RV we live in. Aside from that,
we basically just gave most of our stuff away to Goodwill and put a few
things into storage. We were just renting an apartment, so when our
lease was up, so was our obligation to Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is a
really cool city, by the way, and we’re fortunate to have gotten to
live in such a cool place, but having been in western Pennsylvania most
of my life, I just really wanted a change of scenery.
As far as getting mail, that’s a bit more tricky. First and foremost, I try to get paid via Google Checkout
and handle everything we can via e-mail. When someone just has to mail
us something, you know, because they refuse to let go of the Jurassic
period, we use Earth Class Mail.
It’s a website that gives you a physical address — in our case a
Portland P.O. box — and then you can check your mail online. They’ll
scan stuff for you so that you can just read it right on their website,
and then you can have things forwarded to wherever you’re staying if
you need a piece of mail in hand. I’d prefer to never need a physical
address, but the world just isn’t ready to stop stuffing pieces of
trees into little boxes yet, I suppose.
Webmonkey: How does work work? When do you get work done,
how do you get a connection and how do you keep a work/life balance
when work and life are both within 100 square feet?
Swartz: This was one of the most fun parts of the
whole preparation, sorting out when we’d work, making sure we’d have
time, the technology, et cetera. First of all, aside from just working,
both of us are teaching our son, Tristan, four days a week. We take
turns. My wife, Olivia, does Mondays and Tuesdays and I do Wednesdays
and Thursdays. I personally do most of my work on the days I’m not
teaching, and then a little in the afternoons of the days I am. I’m
probably only working 20 hours a week or less now though, compared to
closer to 40 hours per week when we lived in our apartment in
Pittsburgh. Expenses are lower living in the RV, and to be honest, I’m
really trying to explore more than I work. That might sound “la-dee-da”
or something, but the amount of money I can make from freelancing isn’t
necessarily the amount I want to, you know? I’d rather have $10 and two
days to spend it than $500 and no time left to explore the places we’re
visiting.
Of course, we do still work and have to pay some bills and whatnot,
so we use the internet connections on our iPhones and we’ve also got Sprint AirCards.
The iPhone connection is mostly just for sending e-mail and checking on
things that don’t require any coding or heavy lifting, and the Sprint
cards do the bulk of the work. So far we’ve had pretty good luck. Only
about 10 percent of the campgrounds we’ve stayed in have absolutely no
connection. Basically, with Sprint’s connection we’re not exactly “high
speed,” but it’s enough to get the job done. Reminds me of web design
in the earlier part of the century, when you’d spend an hour coding and
three hours uploading the two lines of code you changed.
Webmonkey: Web Design at 65 MPH: A Family of Web Workers Hits the Road
