The next frontier in remote work: working from blimp?

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I’ve been working from home since COVID-19 came calling like a telemarketer we couldn’t find a way to hang up on. The world changed. Those fortunate enough to have meaningless (non-essential) jobs initially worked from couches, resting our laptops on our chests, poking out terse email replies with otter paws, wrists bent 90 degrees and the company ergonomics department nowhere in sight.

The world was ending anyway. So we’d rise in our pajamas and never take them off, or take video meetings from the waist up, half our bodies “working” while the other half fully committed to the “from home” part of the equation.

Then the pandemic let up. High-profile companies that initially committed to allowing many employees to work from home indefinitely began to backtrack, citing productivity, collaboration, office “culture,” serendipity, etc. Employees are still pushing back.

It took me some time to realize that working from home need not be literal. I could, for example, work from someone else’s home. I could work from hotels. The key was internet access. Meanwhile — say what you will about him — that controversial wizard Elon Musk was moving Starlink satellite internet beyond beta mode into reality. So I bought a camper, equipped it with Wi-Fi and hit the road two winters ago to work from a much smaller home with wheels in warmer climates. I let the snow pile up in Minnesota while I visited national and state parks and forests in North and South Carolina, Alabama and Georgia. There were beaches. The sand piled up in the camper. That first trip I saw perhaps one other Starlink at each campground I visited.

This winter I visited Big Bend National Park, then made my way through forests and parks in New Mexico, Arizona, southern California, Nevada and southern Utah — wherever the weather was nice and I could work outside. This year, it seemed like every fifth camper had a Starlink. The world is changing — fast.

And so now I’ve been thinking about buying a boat — one you can sleep on. The thing with Starlink is that low or no tree coverage is ideal, and two hours north is the greatest of the Great Lakes, Lake Superior, with its welcoming shorelines of seaside communities, camping opportunities and even rarely visited islands that happen to make up a national park. Or I could float down the Mississippi River and Mark Twain my way into New Orleans, and perhaps dance a little better on land because of my new sea legs. I could wear an eyepatch. Nobody knows me there.

Where else can I work from home? Airplanes have Wi-Fi, but it’s expensive to fly and the flights relatively short. Could I work from a hot air balloon? Yes, but the space might be cramped and I would be exposed to the elements. What about a blimp? Is that available? And if I let my boss know, would it raise eyebrows? If I set my work calendar to indicate “working from blimp,” would that cross an unwritten line, flaunting convention a little too frivolously? A certain jealousy might even arise as I floated over my former physical office on my way to say, Patagonia, edge of the world. What are the rules here?

More and more, CEOs want workers back in the office, perhaps because they are in the office. After all, what is the point of rising to the top if no one is around to see you at the top? Isn’t there an unwritten rule that if you make $5 or $10 million, or even $16 million a year, that you need to be highly visible? (The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the median pay for CEOs of the biggest companies reached $15.6 million last year.) You need to be in the office.

Whereas if you make a fraction of that, say, around 0.00384% of that — about what the average worker makes — can we not work from a blimp?