There is a drawer on the table in front of me and my laptop is sitting on top of it.
It came out of the wardrobe behind me. Plywood bottom, a strip of fake wood veneer along the front, a plastic runner still screwed to one side. Upside down on the table it lifts the screen about 15 centimeters, which is the whole trick. My eyes go straight ahead instead of down. My neck stops sending me messages at 4 in the afternoon.
The keyboard sits on the table under the drawer. 250 baht, from a phone shop that also sells cases and screen protectors and one brand of cable that does not work. The mouse is 4 years old and has been in 9 countries. The chair belongs to the guesthouse and is too low, so I sit on a folded towel, which looks exactly as stupid as it sounds.
That is the office. It works.
I did it the expensive way first, for about a year, and it cost real money.
An aluminum stand that folded flat and weighed 400 grams. A mechanical keyboard, because I read somewhere that it was better for your hands. A portable monitor, 15 inches, in a padded case, 220 US dollars.
I carried that bag through 3 borders I remember and some I do not. At an airport in Malaysia a man made me take the monitor out and switch it on in front of him, and then asked what it was for, and I stood there explaining freelance work to somebody who had stopped listening halfway through the first sentence.
The keyboard lasted a month. Guesthouse walls out here are one brick thick and often not even that. Typing on that thing at 11 at night is something you do to other people. A woman in the next room knocked once, politely, and after that it lived at the bottom of the bag with the cables I never used.
I sold the monitor in a Facebook group for half of what I paid. The man came across town on a motorbike to collect it in the rain, with the box strapped between his knees on the way home. I felt bad taking his money. I took it.
The drawer I got from a man in Vientiane.
He had been in the country 11 years. Sixty-something, thin, always in the same grey shirt, out on the balcony at 6 every morning with instant coffee. He taught a few English classes and did something else on a computer that he explained to me twice. Something with claims, or shipping. I never worked out what the company was and I asked him twice, which is my limit.
I knocked on his door one afternoon because the water had gone off in my room and I wanted to know if it was the whole building. It was. Behind him I could see his laptop up on a drawer from his own wardrobe, and a keyboard on the desk under it, and a cushion on the chair.
I remember thinking it looked like a room where a man had stopped trying.
He had been working like that for years. He was 63 and his neck was fine. I was 30-something and mine was not. He worked 4 or 5 hours a day and had done it in that room for longer than I had been out here.
Two weeks later I pulled the drawer out of my own wardrobe. I did not tell him. He left that town before I did, or I left before he did. I genuinely do not remember which.
Two things matter and neither one is a monitor.
How high the screen is, and what you are sitting on.
The screen is easy. A drawer, a stack of books, a box turned over, the plastic crate the water bottles come in. Anything solid and about the height of your hand span. You will feel the difference in 2 days.
The chair is the hard one, and you cannot fix a chair with a drawer. What has worked for me more often than it should is asking. Guesthouses have empty rooms and empty rooms have chairs, and if you go down and ask the owner in person, in the afternoon when nothing is happening, they will usually say yes and then send somebody up with it. People out here say yes to strange requests. Not always. Enough.
I have also bought a chair, once. 800 baht, second hand, delivered on a motorbike, sold to the guesthouse for nothing when I left. That is allowed too.
Everything on the table today cost me under 20 dollars, and half of it belongs to the building.
The version of this problem that gets talked about is a different problem. A dedicated desk in a coworking space, 350 or 400 bucks a month. A private office, 2000 and up. Those are real options and I have paid for both. When the work is heavy and the street is loud, a door is worth every dollar of it.
But there was a stretch, months of it, where I told myself I could not work properly because I did not have the setup. It was a 15 dollar problem and I was pricing it at 400.
None of it travels, and that is the part I like now.
The drawer goes back in the wardrobe. The keyboard stays on the table, because it cost 7 dollars and weighs half a kilo and the bag is already full. I leave the cable folded next to it.
I tried to hand one directly to a woman who cleaned the rooms in a place in Cambodia and I was clumsy about it. She thought I was reporting something broken. She got worried, I got worse at explaining, and in the end I had to go and find the owner to sort it out, over a keyboard worth 3 plates of rice. Now I leave it on the table and mention it at the desk on my way out.
You buy the next one in the next town, in a shop that looks like the last shop, for about the same money.
The drawer goes back in the wardrobe on the day I leave. 10+ years out here, and every invoice I have ever sent was typed on furniture that belonged to somebody else.
Andrew - No Refunds •••