Power Failure: The Coffee Shop Solution

Work started in our office at eight in the morning. But before nine, the power had failed. And it was not back on within a few minutes, as had been the case in the past.  So I decided to put into effect my coffee shop plan for business continuity. Later we would find out that the government planned to keep the power off until four in the afternoon; this would be one of Saigon's summer power outages I had read might happen.

I designated the day one for research for some -- that means reading technical books (not using electricity or computers). And with a laptop, and an iMac (they are surprisingly portable), we moved to a cool coffee shop to continue working for the day. We got off to a bit of a slow recovery because the coffee shop had to get its power generator working. But eventually we were sipping coffee and fruit drinks, eating some great food, and listening to Jazz while we worked from our new office away from the office. I think the day was almost as productive as usual, once we got going, and I'm sure we all had more fun.

I chose to set up in a new coffee shop called "Squared", located at 5 Ly Tu Trong in District 1 of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam -- just across the street from the popular club, "Lush". The coffee shop is owned by a tobacco company, which did not exactly endear it to me. Although I must admit I did think it was rather interesting that they have a tobacco bar where they will make a pack of cigarettes for customers using a blend of tabacco and flavour of their choice.  The reason I

chose this place was because it has good food, pleasant Jazz and Lounge music, and most importantly, good Internet. Today I measured about 350 kbps in both directions with Silicon Valley, but in past days, I measured about a megabit per second of bandwidth.

If power failures like this happen frequently, I might buy a back up generator. But this coffee shop solution seems to work well.