But it was not to be – it started to rain just before I set out, so I took the DLR and got off at Limehouse, confident I had the route well planned. En route I spotted a path by the canal that looked much more scenic than the main road and appeared to lead more directly to my destination. Bad idea. I somehow ended up walking in a circular route around the street I was looking for, getting rather wet in the process.

I was finally rescued by a passer-by who saw me peering at my A-Z. Good thing, as Dod St has no street sign so otherwise I may well have passed it by. There seems to be a moral in my sad story, but I can’t quite think what it is.

I finally squelched into San’s office (and very nice it is too) where he made me tea, fed me croissants and let me gently steam. There was a point to all this soggy urban tramping – here’s the podcast we made about working from home and where to go when home is less appealing. I think you can tell we were having fun as we made it:

You may have come across San wearing his other hat at Bitsy’s #watercoolermoment on Twitter, where he presides over an unruly bunch of home workers at a virtual coffee break from 11 to 12 each weekday.

Come and meet him in person at the next How to Work from Home group at Central on 29 September, when he’ll be passing on the benefits of being a very early adopter and explaining the best tech tools to save time and money in language even the least techie home worker – that’s me – can understand!

As there is no landline in my home office, I’ve been using this amazing bit of technology for making Skype calls, which I do every few days.

In the past my calls have regularly been interrupted by those irritating exchanges of ‘I’m losing you…can you hear me?…can you hear me now?’ Using my new black box thingy the better sound quality was immediately obvious to me, and I’m told I’m coming over clearer at the other end. I haven’t even used the separate mic yet – haven’t needed to.

The main advantage for me is that I can make calls on my mobile without using the handset. Using a mobile next to my ear makes my ear hurt and I get a sensation inside my ear even when I use it with the loudspeaker switched on and the mobile by my mouth. I keep mobile use to an absolute minimum, but occasionally there’s just no way round it so this little black box is a godsend.

So I suppose you’re wondering whether I’d actually make the decision to buy this piece of kit. The honest answer is that left to my own devices I’d never even be aware it existed, but if someone pointed out the factors mentioned above, I might actually consider it. And from me that’s tantamount to a recommendation from anyone tech-savvy.

A quick bit of web research shows they sell from about £135 upwards. No doubt there are distinct differences between models accounting for the price differences, but that’s where my non-techie mind goes blank again.

We’ve all got someone who seems to have been born understanding this stuff, so tell them what kind of calls you make and ask them for a translation if you feel your business calls could be more professional. I actually feel rather chuffed that my home office has been pulled into the 21st century since the photo above was taken two years ago. That’s the thing about us technophobes – once we’ve got it, we love it, but it will be a good few years before we’re willing to go through the process again!

In other words I am completely unexcited by new pieces of kit or software, and I grumble loudly whenever websites and programmes are updated, which they are, constantly. I’m simply unable to comprehend why Google feels the need to come out with Google+ when we’ve already got Facebook, Twitter and ad infinitum.

But I expect a fair proportion of home workers are like me, and have no interest in the equipment they use beyond being confident that it’s actually going to work. So what follows is a fumbling review of the Smartspeaker by a committed technophobe who nevertheless has a strong interest in working as effectively as I can and helping other home workers to do the same.

Left to me, anything black, shiny and box-shaped would stay in its packaging indefinitely, unless it contains chocolate, so I shamelessly asked the ever-patient A to connect it up for me. (Naturally I prefer to call this delegation, while I stick to what I do best, or at least much better).

I didn’t know what to expect so I was pleasantly surprised when a smallish (about 10 cm square) box emerged from the packaging, with a neat little wireless microphone perched on the side. A reports that it was easy and quick to connect, and that I could easily do it if I’d just be bothered to concentrate. Certainly the enclosed booklet has only two sides of incredibly brief instructions which any technophobe could manage to understand.

That’s as much as I can manage thinking and writing in what feels like a foreign language for which I have no dictionary, so we’ll take a break here. Tomorrow I’ll tell you about what happened when I started to use the Smartspeaker…

I’m also working on a new programme for people who are making the shift from corporate to home working, to support them during that challenging first year while they find their home working feet.

If you’ve begun to work from home within the last year and would be prepared to have a phone or Skype chat about your experiences, please tweet me @judyheminsley or e-mail me.

I’m double-checking that I’m including the right content for the programme and so far the people I’ve spoken to seem to have enjoyed talking about the pros and cons of their new lifestyle!

I also love it when out of the blue an answer arrives to a question you have been puzzling over and finally let go of out of sheer exasperation of ever finding a solution. It happened today, funnily enough once again via the lovely San Sharma of Enterprise Nation. Last time he put my book about working from home on the EN Amazon wishlist. Today he has enabled us (OK, to be completely honest, my long-suffering IT helpdesk, A) to put two audio clips on the site that have been languishing unheard for months.

You can find them both on the Judy Heminsley page, but in the same spirit of effortlessness, here’s one you can play without any more clicking. It’s a chat with Nick Williams of Inspired Entrepreneur about cleaning, writing a book and the many joys and challenges of working from home. Thanks, San!