The couple's private offices command the best views of the meadows, woods, and small private pond on the property. In fact, Ryan keeps binoculars close at hand so that he can watch the deer and other wildlife below his windows when he wants a break from developing curricula, making telephone calls, or scanning his E-mail. Though the offices are identical in shape and size, each occupant has arranged the space according to his or her own taste. Ryan has a stuffed recliner and a television as well as a window-spanning Formica counter and a 133 MHz Pentium laptop. He estimates that he spends 75% of his time on the road these days, but the laptop, loaded with Lotus Notes, keeps him linked to his clients. "I'm a recovering mainframe man; I used to think PCs were toys," he says. "Susanna got me into groupware." He teaches his courses at his clients' sites and then monitors the clients' use of the Lotus Notes system on a daily basis, usually for 30 days afterwards. He can replicate their data over the phone line, analyze trends in their database use, and then post comments to a public-discussion database or send personal E-mails to a sales rep for individual coaching. "I can be sitting in my bathrobe and slippers delivering high-quality service--and no one is charged for travel time," he says.
To design her office, Opper turned to feng shui principles--the classic Chinese art of positioning physical environments (homes, burial sites, and gardens) according to auspicious spatial arrangements. One feng shui notion argues that a person working behind a desk should always face the door, to avoid being startled or overseen. So Opper positioned her desk in an "L," which gives her the flexibility to face either the window or the doorway separating her private office from the conference room.
Early on, Opper and Ryan considered installing a sliding door between their offices. Instead, they put their phone lines on an intercom. The same intercom is connected to the doorbell, so if they are in the middle of a working session, they can invite latecomers upstairs without breaking their stride.
Opper and Ryan have tried to think of everything. The only "shadows in paradise," they say, are things not amenable to individual solutions--like the telecommunications infrastructure in Berkshire country. The couple live too far away (eight miles) from Bell Atlantic's central office to get ISDN lines, and private T-1 lines, they feel, are too expensive. There is no cell-phone tower nearby, and the hills cut off most signals. Ryan believes that the solution will ultimately consist of going to satellite, since satellite-based direct TV signals are already available locally.
For now, the best they can do to address their entrepreneurial needs is to join forces with their neighbors. To that end, Opper has joined the board of directors of Community Development Corp. of South Berkshires Inc., which has a representative on the Telecommunications Task Force of the Berkshire regional-planning commission. "One strategy is to build a consortium of interested business parties [to close the gap in the infrastructure]," says Opper. "I'm confident that this is a problem we can solve."
Fred Fay: Necessity Is the Mother of Invention
When Frederick A. Fay was 16 years old, he broke his neck in a trapeze accident.
Sent to a rehabilitation center in Warm Springs, Ga., for six months of intensive physical therapy and the practical lessons that would prepare him for his new life as a quadriplegic, Fay found himself in a setting whose tone had been set by a famous polio patient, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt had bought the property, located on the outskirts of Atlanta, in the 1920s, when it comprised just an inn with hydrotherapy equipment. He'd added amenities such as a nine-hole golf course that was completely accessible to people in wheelchairs.
Fay was surprised--and outraged--when he returned home to Washington, D.C., to find that "every single curb was like a Berlin Wall telling me that I was not welcome to travel farther than a block." Lobbying to get access for the disabled immediately became his life's work; achieving it has become his life's triumph. Fred Fay's disability-rights rÉsumÉ since the 1960s is long and varied. It includes work that led to Medicaid's reimbursement of personal-care assistants and federal funding for community-based independent living. This past fall, he received the Prince Charitable Trusts' prestigious Henry B. Betts Award, which carries an unrestricted $50,000 cash prize, for his advocacy efforts. These days, he works full-time moderating the mailing list Justice for All E-mail Network, which he helped form in January 1995, right after the congressional elections. Relying primarily on the labor of volunteers, Justice for All works with state and national organizations that advance the rights of people with disabilities to get word from Washington, D.C., to the grass roots.
Yet in retrospect, the challenges of organizing and fighting for access to physical space were just a warm-up for the challenges he has taken on in the 1990s. Fred Fay wants all disabled men, women, and children to have complete, unfettered access to cyberspace. Whether they are blind or deaf. Whether they live independently or in an institution. Whether they started using modems 30 years ago--as Fay did, when he managed a small computer-programming information center in IBM's Federal Systems Division--or have never touched a computer before.
Fay's astonishing home office provides proof that the greatest disabilities most of us suffer are a lack of ingenuity and a failure of imagination. When a spinal-cord cyst progressed up his neck to his brain stem 18 years ago, Fay went from sitting upright in a wheelchair to lying flat on his back full-time. He designed and then moved into a contraption he calls a "wheelbed," which is controlled by a motorized joystick. Glancing in a well-positioned rear- and side-view mirror, he rolls down the halls of the simple ranch house in Concord, Mass., that he shares with his life partner, Trish Irons, and crosses a widened threshold. Once inside his office, he rolls the wheelbed into a three-sided work space made of wood and counterbalanced industrial-metal shelving. It is as intricately laid out as the interior of a space capsule.
