It’s taken a while; I’ve had a Skype account since 2000. Quite honestly, I haven’t used it much at all. I usually didn’t even keep the client running. As an instant messenger client, it failed on two points: 1. it’s not Yahoo! (I work for Yahoo!), and 2. I didn’t have any friends (friends on Skype, that is).
What brought me back to Skype, so to speak, was my cellphone. You see, the team of engineers I work with is permitted to work from home on Fridays. We started this practice last summer, when gas prices reached $4.50/gallon. It’s proven to be pretty popular, as you can imagine; it lets people arrange things like bank visits, auto repair, and regular doctor’s appointments in advance, without having a severe impact on anyone else on the team.
However, working from home on Fridays means that all of our regular meetings are done via teleconference. Many of the team members (and myself) used our cellphones, until we realized that 2-3 hours of calls every Friday tended to eat up our minutes. So a bunch of people on the team started using Skype, since it’s free for calling toll-free numbers (and our conference calls are all toll-free numbers). I use Vonage at home but, frankly, the quality is inconsistent and the router constantly gives me problems.
So I tried Skype one week, and was hooked. Again.
This past weekend, I used Skype for video conferences with both my mother and my wife’s mother. My wife is now hooked, too. It’s a wonderful experience to be able to see the person you’re talking with; in my parents’ case, they recently moved to a retirement home that I had never seen. My brother (who supplied the computer running Skype for the event), took me on a tour of the whole complex. Very, very cool.
Now I just need to get more friends in my list.
My Skype name is gecampbell.
