Ragan.com by remote: A wireless tangle in the home ‘office’

I’ve never had a home phone.

For the last decade or so, I just haven’t needed one. I don’t talk on the phone all that much outside of work—I prefer talking face-to-face or instant messaging for socializing—and for the phone chatting I do, my cell phone works fine.

But when the Ragan Editorial staff started talking about working at home for a week using our own equipment, a sudden, desperate need for a landline phone, or a working approximation of one, washed over me. Cell phone minutes aren’t free, after all, and I like to record my interviews with sources so the conversation isn’t full of long gaps in which I try to get down every word of a lengthy quote.

Rather than calling up the phone company to come install a line and start sending me a shiny new bill every month, I opted for the free route and set up a Google Voice account. If you’re not familiar with Google Voice, it’s essentially an online phone in your computer, somewhat similar to Skype.