Hot-desking gets a bad rap. It was an experimental concept to reduce office space requirements that has been losing favor because it hurts morale, can cause social tension, and is arguably un-hygienic. In hot-desking, employees don’t have a single personal space. Employees check into vacant workstations with a login. Upon Login, their personal, virtual desks are immediately available. When their shifts end they log out and a new person uses the same space. If you know the origin of the term, you’ll understand the downside. The term hot-desking comes from the practice of hot-bunking on submarines. Because space is tight on a sub, up to three sailors can share the same bunk. When their shifts end they get into bunks that other sailors have just vacated, and the beds are still warm. Eeeewwww.

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For a long time the technology business was a closed society. Behind the scenes, IT administrators kept rooms full of servers and switches running. Everyone else did their jobs, oblivious to IT until something broke. From that era, IT professionals became accustomed to speaking in a code of acronyms and shorthand known only to those inside the fold. The language was not specifically designed to keep outsiders away. Rather, it was a language developed out of both expediency and familiarity.

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The Fruit, not the Computers

For a long time we talked about IoT in the abstract, something that will happen. The future is now, and applications are budding everywhere, being used to solve practical real world problems in places you might not imagine. A Swiss company has created a device for monitoring fruit, not just the area where the fruit is being stored, but the actual temperature inside the fruit. Getting fresh fruit from the grower to the eater is complicated. The potential for spoilage increases the farther it goes and the more times it is transferred. With Wi-Fi enabled Fruit Simulators hidden in cartons of produce, and a mobile Pepwave cellular device, a grower could watch the crop go from the orchard to the final consumer destination.

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That is the question. Telephones are changing, especially in the United States. The traditional copper-wired network is not being innovated, and POTS (plain old telephone service) networks are being phased out. Even if you still have a wired phone service into your building, at some place along the line the call ends up digitized and transmitted, then turned back to analog at the other end. It seems like VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is the obvious choice. No so fast. There are reasons why either might work best. It is an even more difficult choice for a business that already has an investment in an analog PBX system.

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