Hi! I've been lurking on the list for a while, and really enjoying reading about the ups and downs of coworking all over the country. I'm a freelance stenographer (AKA realtime captioner, CART provider, stenographer for Deaf and hard of hearing students and professionals), and I used to belong to a coworking space (even wrote a blog post about it: http://blog.stenoknight.com/2011/03/how-coworking-saved-my-home-life.html) back when I was working for two universities in Brooklyn and one in the Caribbean (so I was doing work onsite for the first two, but remotely for the last one), and living in a tiny junior one-bedroom apartment in Upper Manhattan. I currently live in a nice two-bedroom apartment a few blocks away from the old place, with a dedicated office and a wideband internet connection, which works great for the relatively small amount of remote work I do. The majority of my time is spent onsite on the Lower East Side, but the two-hour commute (at rush hour, anyway) is getting to me, and I'd like to switch most if not all of my work from onsite to remote. My current home office would be great for that, except that my wife and I are thinking about having a kid in the next year or so, and if we stay where we are, the office would have to become their bedroom. I could always set up camp in the living room, of course, but that might be disruptive, both because my desk will be right in the middle of everything and because I'm worried that if there's a crying kid in the place, even with heavy-duty sound-blocking headphones, I won't be able to hear the audio from my clients (which would be bad, since accurate realtime transcription is what they pay me for). So the obvious solution is to find some office space nearby, but I've been googling around and coming up with nothing. It looks like there aren't any coworking spaces in the Washington Heights or Inwood area. I've thought about trying to found one myself (probably a not-for-profit space, considering how dicey it is to make money out of coworking), but I'd have to have a big group of fellow freelancers on board, and I'm worried about the potential financial risk involved, especially if I'm going to be starting a family and potentially taking a pay cut (onsite work tends to pay better than remote) at the same time. Any advice? This would all be a year or two down the line, but I feel like I should start thinking about it now. All I'd need is a quiet, low-cost space with room for a desk and wired high-speed internet that I can access without jumping on the subway. That shouldn't be impossible, right?
Mirabai Knight StenoKnight CART Services http://stenoknight.com [email protected] -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
