Telecommuters tell their tales

The long distance employment option

By FRITZ MAYER

SULLIVAN COUNTY, NY — A lot of local people claim that there are too few ways to make a good living in the area. But the lack of jobs has not been a drawback for the people mentioned in this article, who have turned to telecommuting to pay the mortgage and buy the groceries.

For much of Susan Brown Otto’s career, she was a globe-hopping international tax specialist, who worked in such places as Paris, Brussels, New York and Los Angeles.

But in June 2003, Brown Otto, a certified public accountant, decided to move her accounting practice to the family farm on which she grew up in Kenoza Lake. It worked?in fact it worked a little too well. By the summer of 2007, Brown Otto had more work than she could handle, and the office at the farm was too small to accommodate the part-time employees she had hired. Her solution was to merge her practice on January 1 with one of the most prominent accounting firms in the area, Cooper Niemann.

Technology made it all possible. During an interview at her new offices on Route 17 in Mongaup Valley, Brown Otto, who specializes in taxes for foreigners who work in the United States and Americans who work overseas, recounted the changes she’s seen during her career. In the early ’80s, she and her colleagues at Price Waterhouse filled out tax forms in pencil, and papers had to be mailed from place to place. Then came a big change with fax machines, which were intensified with the personal computer revolution and the internet.

Now, Brown Otto can email a document to a client who is working in, say, China, and go over it with him on the phone. Without the new technology, her telecommuting life would much more difficult, if not impossible. As it is, she now has the best of both worlds. She goes to New York City a few days a month, but works mainly in Sullivan County. And with her new arrangement with Cooper Niemann, she still has time in the mornings to help her father with his business by lending a hand with loading hay into the delivery truck.

Not all occupations can be transferred entirely to a telecommuting operation, but sometimes a compromise can be found. About three years ago, Garran J. Graner Esq. needed to start spending a lot of time with her elderly parents in the Jeffersonville area because of their medical needs. With a law office and an apartment in Manhattan, it was difficult in the beginning.

As a working attorney, she said, “You might get a phone call from a judge that mandates you to be at the courthouse at 2:00 p.m. to resolve an issue, and how do you tell a supreme court judge, ‘well, I’m actually upstate and I can’t get there by 2:00 p.m.’ It was becoming a difficult issue.”

Her solution was to phase out her litigation work. She kept her real estate work and got involved in a new type of legal pursuit, working with a group that raises financing for international development projects, much of which can be done over the phone and with email.

Graner said in a phone interview from the city, “Documents can be prepared wherever I am.” When she’s up here she uses Verizon wireless service. She said, “Without the technology, it would be very difficult to do what I’m doing.” She added, “Now, because I’m spending so much time up there, I might create a business up there.”

In another telecommuting example, Kevin McDonough and Kay Schuckhart, who live in Narrowsburg, were early adopters. McDonough, who writes a television column that is seen in upwards of 70 newspapers around the country, said that in 1995, he and Schuckhart, “both felt like we were living in New York to work in New York, and working in New York to be able to live in New York.”

McDonough at the time was working as an editor at a publishing house. He said, “I bamboozled my publisher into letting me work three days a week in the city, and two days a week up here.” Politically, however, it wasn’t that smooth in the office, because there was some jealousy. But that period didn’t last that long.

He soon started his television column. He said, “The TV gig fell in my lap completely unplanned. I never set out to become a television critic, but it dovetailed with our desire to live up here.”

Schuckhart, a graphic artist who creates art books and coffee-table books, could also work from home. While in the beginning, it was more difficult to perform some parts of her job such as shipping the graphics to distant locations, with the evolution of the related technology, the tasks have become easier.

All four people in the article rely heavily on the internet, and specifically on broadband connections. McDonough and Brown Otto said they are concerned that many area residents don’t have access to a broadband connection. Brown Otto has satellite internet connections at her home in Bethel and at the farm, but it’s expensive and can be put out by a storm. She said the cable internet at her new office is a better alternative.

McDonough agreed. He said, “If you don’t have broadband, you’re really a second-class media citizen.”

Brown Otto said once the situation is addressed, perhaps even more telecommuters will be drawn to the area.