While I had a concrete idea of what I wanted a design studio to be, I also had another dream—of not being there. My fantasy had always been to spend an entire summer at the beach with my family. I planned to do a little work from there. Touch base with the studio every few days, review work, do some minor design projects. There was only one little problem. It was 1995.
Helen and I went to Rehoboth Beach in Delaware in the early spring to find a suitable house. We signed a three-month lease on a lovely home on a quiet road at Middlesex Beach, just a quick hop across Route 1 to their exclusive life-guarded beach. It seemed we were set for the summer. However, things didn’t quite work out that way. The quiet road the house was on turned out to be the main access to the back bay and canals, and there was constant traffic once summer began. Middlesex beach properties ended on the other side of that street, so we received no permits to access their beach. And going to the beach with two children, five-year-old Steven and Big Sister Rebecca, aged 8, required way too much paranoid attention.
Some things are easily remedied, if not legitimately. Since I brought design equipment with me, it was simple to forge a parking pass for Middlesex Beach. Sometimes it’s good to have a very special set of skills. Too bad we hardly used it. We soon discovered that being on the land side of Route 1 and a short drive to the beach was not nearly as attractive as it seemed. I guess our parents and siblings agreed. Despite the extra room, they never visited.
But what about the part of the fantasy that involved a little work from the beach? I brought a computer, monitor, printer, and a modem to the beach. Using the modem, I could call into the office network and text everyone using an on-screen messaging app, have files sent to me to review, and even use the office printer.
I had even purchased the world’s first consumer digital camera, the Apple QuickTake 100. With it, I could take a picture and download it to my computer, edit it and send it anywhere I wanted through the modem! At a resolution of 640×480 pixels, it was almost useless as a camera, but we figured out ways around the studio to make it pay for itself. The useless thing I used it for was taking a picture of my feet at the beach, editing in a voice balloon in Quark, and sending the image to the office printer where people waited breathlessly as the inkjet scrolled out the picture, which said, “NYAA-NYAA.”
Being able to sign in to work was, in reality, too appealing. When I lived a block from the studio, I couldn’t help but mosey over after dinner and see what was up. Being a phone call away from the studio was the same temptation, although it was just a few hours a day.
While we did have lots of fun with our kids, it was a reality that the kids were often bored and got tired of going to the beach. If it weren’t for Donkey Kong, we might not have made it through the “vacation.” Helen, who continues to teach movement classes, missed her students. Our doctors were two hours away, and when Helen had to get a tooth extracted because of our family’s effort to learn how to Rollerblade, it was a long trip. Apparently, I was the only one having fun, but I guess it was my fantasy.
As the time wore on, we were too stubborn to go home for a bit; we bought this expensive rental, and we were going to enjoy it, no matter what. But when the time came to go home and get back to our regular lives, we realized we liked our house; we enjoyed our work. We are obviously terrible vacationers.
Still, a moment that sticks with me is our daughter Rebecca, then 8, offering to buy lunch at the McDonalds down the street for her brother Steven on his fifth birthday—all by themselves. We watched them walking down to the little strip mall at the bottom of the road, Rebecca holding Steven’s hand. We were thinking, only a little uneasily. “Ah, a little time for ourselves.” It’s hard to imagine parents doing that today.
My summer vacation wasn’t a fantasy; it was science fiction. Imagine being able to work from anywhere, send messages instantly to anyone, send movies and images digitally around the world, teach classes with video conferencing, and control things over some sort of “wireless” network. I was twenty-five years too early. My long-distance bill that summer was 1500 bucks.
