Perks of a laptop

I spent a long time working at home, but when this academic year started some of my work went back to campus. I have fair numbers of contact hours with the students again. So far I haven't really been confronted with awkward gaps between contact hours, so I get generally just bike in, do my teaching, and bike again. But it will inevitably happen that I have some gap between lectures that the only reasonable thing to do is to go to the office and work there for a bit. Although as things stand, that office does not have a computer in it.

The other thing is that I depend on voice recognition software, and that only runs on my own computer. I can't run it on the network, so if I am teaching using the computer in a lecture room, I have to use mouse and keyboard, and that hurts.

When I saw both issues coming, I asked the University to give me a laptop. And they gave me one! My first foray with it wasn't successful; when I plugged it in, the system decided it wasn't properly configured, and refuse to recognise it. But in most lecture rooms you can just plug your laptop in, let it find the University Wi-Fi on its own, and run with it. Or, in my case, talk to it. I'm quite satisfied how it works. So I now also confident that when I need to use my office, I just can. I just bring the laptop and I'm sorted! Isn't it great when things just worked out…