About Me > Telecommuting from Cairo

Tele-commuting from Cairo

After a month of working form San Francisco on a fairly technical UI design project, it suddenly struck me that I could be doing this work from just about anywhere. One of my goals for the year had been to visit the middle-east, so I decided to put one and one together, packed my bags, and flew to Cairo.

On my first day, it took a couple hours for me to get my mobile office set-up and situated :

I found a delightful quiet little hotel in downtown Cairo for $45/night. Hotel Osiris
I picked up a pay-as-you-go 'holiday' SIM card from Vodafone and inserted it into my unlocked GSM cellphone. I now have an egyptian telephone number, and can call the US for between 20c/min and 60c/min.
I set up a Skype-In number, and forwarded it to my egyptian cellphone number.
I forwarded my US home phone and cellphone to my Skype-In number. - Calls to my US landline and cell forward to skype and on to my egyptian cell number. No-one will even notice I'm gone. Unless, that is, they call me at 5pm which is 3am my time. Then I'll be grumpy!

Does it work? On Tuesday evening (11pm Local time, 1pm Pacific) I fired up my laptop, plugged into the hotel router, called in from my cellphone, and badda-bing, badda-boom, I'm working.... just the same as in SF.

During the mornings and evening, I work on my laptop from my hotel, and in the afternoon I take off for a little walk around town to pick up the culture.

(Videos require Windows Media Player. Boo. I'll get round to using flash one day)

	Street Crossing Crossing streets in Cairo is like a real-life version of Frogger. This is a fairly tame intersection, but you'll get the idea. Jay-walking is de-rigeur, traffic rules are unheard of. No wonder Egypt has the worst accident rate in the world!
	Untidy Cairo A panorama from the Al-Ghoria (?) Mosque on a rare day when the smog dosen't reduce visibility to half a mile. After a few hours of pounding the street, I was a tad un-optimistic about the quality of life in Cairo.
	Seedy Nightlife The Cairo equivalent of a strip club. A fat woman trying to belly dance to a smarmy singer with slicked back hair. Lots of middle-aged men smoke sheesha, drink, and wonder if this is what life is like in the west. A miserable woman in the corner keeps an eye on them.