One of the complications with this digital nomad experience is dealing with the UK. Not just time zone differences, that can be mitigated quite easily as the UK’s 9-5 is 4pm – midnight in Thailand. But lack of office infrastructure. I have to send some paperwork to my bank in the UK in order to make some account amendments, back at home this would have been as simple as print, sign, fax or maybe even print, sign, post. Out here though, working in a hotel room I’m stuck at the first hurdle ..
Fortunately just opposite Tiger Muay Thai there is a small internet cafe where everything is 10 BHT (20 pence). 10 BHT for 15 minutes of Internet time, 10 BHT to print 1 sheet of paper, 10 BHT to scan 1 piece of paper.
I copied my PDF to my USB stick and headed over there, only to find the PC didn’t detect the USB stick. That was ok as I had the URL of the document I needed to print on my phone. 10 minutes later I had a print out!
After filling the form in, scanning it was next, which was easy, and I logged in to my throw away email account and emailed myself the scanned PDF. Now I’m back in the hotel, I’ve changed the password on my throw away email account and created another one. I then deleted the PDF from the desktop and emptied the recycle bin.
Securing Yourself In An Internet Cafe
You cannot trust Internet cafes, anywhere. You have to expect key loggers to be installed as well as other monitoring tools, so bare that in mind when ever you use one.
I never log in to anything important in an Internet Cafe, never online banking, never my real email account.
Create throw away email accounts, if you need to send yourself a document or a web page, you can then use the throw away email account to email your real email account. Of course make sure you use different passwords on your throw away accounts!