Orange is not a colour, it's a state of mind

This week, our international product team launched Xero Answers – a site for questions & answers for our new product Xero Personal. Rather than have a massive customer base flood our email support queue, we’re going to try this largely user-based approach to helping our customers, the aim being that people can see questions previously asked & answered, saving them having to do it, & also to give an opportunity for people to help each other out as they build up their own product knowledge & learn their own ways of using the product that they want to share.

It’s still orange & it’s had a few questions posted to it already; I’m nervously keeping watch over it trying to answer the questions as best I can but I am further removed from this product than Xero Business that I wrote most of the Help Centre for. I really hope it grows into a big community site like some others I’ve seen where eventually we can hook up a blog, the @XeroPersonal Twitter feed & stuff like that. And maybe even extend it to our business product. Early days!

Planes make me think. I guess you’re always going some place new or some place old that can make you look forward to new things or think about old things you want to leave behind, in either case, you’re going somewhere.

I’ve been thinking a lot about working remotely, in a different geographical location and timezone from the main office, and after weeks of this filling space in my head I’m going to attempt to get some of it out – after all that’s what I started my blog for even though since we’ve been away it’s become a glorified travel diary. Time for it to return to its routes as an outlet and store of my random thoughts! However I have to be careful this doesn’t cross a line – in this age of social media and people being fired for airing their grievances online and acting in a way out of line in the eyes of the company I will likely have to watch what I say, which kind of defeats the point of a personal blog! I don’t hate my job and this isn’t a precursor to any major decisions, just supposed to be random stuff about working remotely!

So why is this topic filling my head? I don’t think it’s one thing, I think it’s a collection of little things. I think if I was to pick one thing, or have one thing to sum it all up, it’s that change thing. I thought that being out of the office would open up a new way of working for me, give me some new and different things to do, stimulate new thoughts or ideas and above all, give me some freedom to change bad work habits for ones I actually want. However, due to my own need for routine, the office not really being set up for remote workers and the new way of communication that’s required for remote working, I’ve been unable to bring about new work habits.

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I smelled the rolls of gladwrap in the supermarket yesterday to find one that didn’t have a smell. Didn’t realise you can get actual ‘Glad’ here, and it doesn’t smell. Yipeeee!

I’ve thought of a couple of things people could invent lately. Well, I’ve invented them, just need someone to make them so I can get rich! So, 2 excellent ideas:

1. Walking to work we followed a guy from our building, 2.5 blocks to the subway and he spent the entire time walking in front of us trying to untangle his iPod earphones. In the end he gave up and listened to the city instead. Need some kind of silicon no-stick spray to spray on them to untangle them or the little fabric bag they’re kept in needs some magical insides with the same properties.
2. Got to work and folks in the office were gushing over the iPad … of course The Mister chimed in. They showed us some of their sites made for mobile devices working on the iPad – including a site that shows video demonstrations of meals being made. So you just prop your iPad up in the kitchen and follow along, pausing the video to do your bit. Enter my invention: little rubber or flesh-like-fabric caps to put on the end of various cooking utensils so you can tap the screen to pause and resume the video! Saves you having to wash your hands or get flour or wet all over it.

So let me know if you get these to market and I’ll take some royalties

A few random thoughts recently about some food here as we try to find what we need from various grocery stores:

• I’m finding lots of things are much sweeter here – bread, bagels, potato chips, honey (in an unnatural way) and Lemsip is practically sugar granules. We’re now reading the back of bread packets in the supermarket looking at the sugar content.
• The butter substitutes are so slimy, especially after being in a sandwich all day. We found something now that seems to be spreadable butter (rather than ‘spreadable with buttery taste’ or ‘butter-like taste’ – obviously not butter) although it is still quite white.
• Gladwrap smells, or cling film or plastic wrap or whatever it’s called. At first I thought it was a sandwich ingredient or the bread that smelled when I opened my lunch each day until the other day I took a half eaten museli bar, wrapped for a morning snack, and smelled that smell. Not sure how we’ll solve that one – go around sniffing rolls of gladwrap in the supermarket I suppose!

Another big milestone at work, launched the personal version of Xero on Monday (NZ time) – it’s been coming a while and with great anticipation by our customers and commentators. It was the first release with us out of the country and it was rather pleasant to just wake up at the normal time, have breakfast then sit down for our respective roles in the release.

It was the start of a very busy few days – that Sunday (for us) morning, about 5 minutes after the release went live, the news started spreading on Twitter – and didn’t stop for 3 days! I almost went cross-eyed and started seeing and worrying about tweets in my sleep – all that Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. I thought tweeting for Xero might be a full-time job some day but not that quickly! However, all has returned to relative normal now and I have welcomed lots more Xero fans and got hundreds more followers in those 3 days. Yaaaay, the community is growing.

So I’m receiving increasing pressure to blog which I will hopefully have time for while we’re in the States but in the meantime hope you’ve enjoyed the little rush of them over the last week. I’ve just had no time to sit down and do them when I get home and they’ve been floating around in my head bothering me. It’s weird that I have that feeling that I just have to get everything done before we go – at this rate I’ll have finished all my work before we get there and have none left to do – ridiculous because I’m not stopping work when we get there! Well, except for the first week off.

Anyway, it’s about this time of the night I find myself home at the dining table. Yes working. I often glance up to the traffic coming around from The Terrace and I always notice that many of them go over the double line onto the wrong side of the road. Some not so much, some a lot. Some so much that in the space of an hour there could’ve been some very bad accidents were a car coming the other way at the same time. The corner is pretty sharp, but there is a warning sign that it’s a left-angle bend and most people at this time of the day must be on the evening commute so surely realise how sharp the corner is.

So, in manner of nosy old woman twitching net curtains in a cul de sac, I decided to take 5 minutes to tally up how many cars came around the corner and how many went wide enough to be riding on the double yellow line and see whether any went way over.

The tally from 6.25pm – 6.30pm

• 65 – number of cars that came around that corner in 5 minutes
• 42 – number of cars that tracked a ‘good’ line around the bend
• 20 – cars that were close too or on the double yellow line (I define that as wide)
• 3 – cars that went OVER the yellow line (and a scooter!)

I was rather shocked!

Don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but on TV programmes and in movies, whenever someone leaves their job they seem to do so with only one box. A brown or white file box, often with a lid and sometimes with a plant. Seems a bit dubious to me because I seem to have a lot of stuff around and under my desk, not to mention the collection of orange pens and post-it notes.

However, today we packed up our desks in the likely event that due to Xero’s continuing growth spurt new people will need to sit at our desks while we’re gone. After recycling my non-essentials I was very surprised that I have stuffed my 3 years at Xero into ONE box! Includes my collection of orange things, cup, framed pictures, the Xero User Guide when it existed in book form, a ream of orange paper and more!

It now waits in the storeroom with my special orange chair for my return.

So that’s our desks spring-cleaned, and the apartment – have scrubbed pantry, shower (with a toothbrush even!), fridge, balcony pots; emptied, scrutinized and repacked cupboards under stairs, basins and hot water cupboard and we’re now down to eating strange meals to use up bits of random food from freezer, fridge and pantry. And to top off the weekend The Mister went next door to see our neighbour who we don’t see for months (so she probably wouldn’t’ve noticed we were gone) to tell her about a stranger coming and going from our apartment only to be greeted by a stranger staying there while she was away – looking rather rumpled and disturbed in a bathrobe so he’s quite embarrassed. Dammit. The first time I’ve ever got him to go over to the neighbours and that. Now he’ll never go again. Sigh.

This year I’m doing a project that quite a few people have done – Project 365 – which is to take a photo every day of the year. I don’t really have an artistic goal in mind, not aiming to get better at taking photos or anything like that, it’s just I take quite a lot of photos of random, every day things anyway so I thought I might as well make a conscious effort to take and publish one photo a day.

So, January is over and I have 31 photos for the project so far.

The photos are published on Flickr, in my set called Project 365.

Went for a wander today up to Aro Street – I can’t believe how relentless the wind is at the moment and I certainly wasn’t dressed for summer. Aro Street looks a bit like small town New Zealand in this photo – not a city suburb.

This is the first photo I’m bringing you from my Flickr account. See how you get on … you can click on it.