Town: Mary

Mary is divorced and lives with her twenty year-old son, Michael, who is still promising to leave home. At least he has a job and contributes towards the household bills now. This has allowed Mary to give up her full time job. They live in a small terraced house in a large town.

Scroll down to read all the ways localnet impacts her life or click on a bullet point below to jump to the item that most interests you.

 

Working from Home

The best thing the localnet has done for Mary is to enable her to work from home. She has never driven and found that travelling to work by bus took nearly as many hours a week as she spent there - and cost her almost ten percent of her salary.

She now works two or three hours most days assembling small electronic goods at home. This is the same work she used to do full-time in the factory twenty miles away. It was only with the introduction of localnet that her employer was able to start sending the various components and sub-assemblies between the workers' homes. This option is now so popular that the company has increased its output yet managed to sublet half its building - with the cost savings going straight to the bottom line.

Mary can work whenever and at for as long as she likes each day. She has a rack of five  OmniBoxes in her spare room where she assembles the electronic toys that her employer manufactures. Four hold the various components and the fifth she fills with finished items. Every few days when she’s filled a box, she gives it to the delivery driver. The system at the factory obviously keeps track of how many of each component – circuit board, displays, rubber feet etc. each one uses as there’s always a new box of components arrives a day or two before she runs out of any items.

Speech Recognition Interface

Mary doesn't like using the internet but as she’s always in when the lunchtime delivery van comes round, she uses the highly sophisticated speech recognition system that it carries with it. She basically “speaks” to the driver - whether that's Fred, Sally or Jenny - tells them what she wants to order and they “recognise” the words, convert them into commands using semantic and syntactic algorithms and enter these commands via the touchpad devices they carry. This achieves an amazing 99% accuracy despite Mary's broad Lancashire accent!

Exterior DeliveryCabinet 

Mary couldn't justify the size or cost of one of the fancy delivery hatch things that the folks up the road have in their (extended) kitchen. She opted for the most basic DeliveryCabinet outside her front door. This metal cabinet will hold two  OmniBoxes or one  OmniBox plus four of the smaller PaperBoxes or MealBoxes. She normally comes out to meet the delivery man but if she's not up he'll lock her newly delivered boxes securely to the cabinet so only she can retrieve it. At the same time he'll take the previous day's boxes back along with any recyclables Mary has put in them.

The more expensive cabinets have temperature controlled sections but they need mains power and that means holes in the wall which Mary didn't want. This does mean that she has to be a bit careful when having chilled goods delivered in the summer - but they come in a well-insulated box with a freezer block in it so they actually keep cool for several hours.

A Leisurely Breakfast with the Paper

Now that she doesn’t need to rush off to the factory – a journey that used to take an hour or more each way on the bus – she waits till her son has gone to work before getting out of bed most days. She knows Michael will have popped his head out the door to bring in their breakfast box from the cabinet by her front door. It’ll have been put there about half an hour earlier and is actually two boxes stuck together. One contains the morning paper and any post while the other has her breakfast treat in it. 

She gets a large glass of orange juice and a pastry every morning – either a croissant, pain au chocolat or some sort of Danish pastry. They’re always freshly baked (she’s seen them cooking them at the LocalHub) and still warm. She loves not knowing exactly what she’ll find as she went for the “shuffle” option - which her kind speech recognition system (Terry it was, that morning) explained it to her.

One morning there was a custard Danish pastry that she really didn’t like but when she mentioned this to Terry he just said “no problem” and touched a picture of a sad face on his handheld gadget. She’s never had that pastry again and it’s now several months so she reckons he’s done something to tell them to make it a random choice – but not the custard Danish!

Groceries

With Michael at home they get through an  OmniBox every other day but as she doesn’t have to order too much in advance, and she’s more than happy to eat any leftovers for lunch the next day, she finds that they hardly throw any food away these days.

Wine Tasting

Now she’s retired she likes to treat herself and Michael to a good bottle of wine twice a week. She used to be in a Wine club – but now she's on a lower salary she doesn't want to risk wasting money on several bottles she doesn't like. Now she gets bottles one at a time – for pretty much the same price she used to pay when they came in cases. If she likes one, she can just ask for the same again for the next few times – or can order a few extra and put them away for a rainy day.

DVD Rental

Mary doesn't want broadband internet but of an evening, she and Michael will often watch a DVD together. If they remember to pop it in the box and leave it out for collection before they go to bed there’ll be another one delivered in time for the following evening. Again, as she doesn’t like using the internet she’ll usually select one of the new releases or recommended DVDs on the selection list she gets with the DVD. This changes every week so there’s never any shortage of new choices to pick from.

 

Posting Things

Mary buys and sells quite a lot of things on eBay and used to have to walk to the Post Office on the other side of town to post her parcels. Now she just pops them in the DeliveryCabinet and they're taken within hours. She's convinced there's some magic going on as she's worked out the localnet van will drive straight past if she hasn't put anything in the DeliveryCabinet and will only stop if she has!

Recycling

Just before localnet came to town, Mary was at the end of her tether with the huge number of different recycling boxes and bins she was being issued with. She was happy to try and comply but the nine boxes and bins she ended up with took up half her tiny kitchen and the wheelie bins were so big she had to leave them outside the front of her house permanently.

Where they stood, the much smarter localnet DeliveryCabinet is now bolted to her wall. Because the recycling and rubbish are collected every day, she doesn't need such big bins or so many boxes. The clever partitions inside every  OmniBox let her separate glass, metal, plastics and compostables all in the one box. Paper and card go back in the container the post came in that morning.

Entertaining

Mary likes to have some of her work colleagues round for coffee mornings - as she no longer sees them every day at the factory. She now realises that although they used to see each other every day, they never actually spoke or got to know each other! Now, she can order a box of pastries and cakes to be delivered fresh that morning. Previously she'd have had to make a trip into the town centre just to fetch them. .

Books

Mary is an avid reader and devours books at a great rate. She finds her money goes a lot further now that she orders these via localnet and sends them back when she’s finished them. It also avoids the house filling up with paperbacks as it used to.

Storage

Mary wishes her house were bigger. She's learned to live within the space she has but Michael's stuff seems to be growing and creeping out of his cupboards into hers. He hates throwing anything away as he reckons he'll “need it when I move out”. Sick of waiting for that day, Mary has “helped” him to sort out ten  OmniBoxes of rarely used stuff and sent them off for storage somewhere in the localnet system.

It was a struggle but she convinced him by showing him how it worked with one box of her own stuff. Despite Michael being convinced they would “lose it straight away” it came back a week later, just three hours after she asked delivery driver Terry to get it back for.

All in All...

Mary now has a much more relaxed, stress-free life than she used to. She has regained at least ten hours a week by not having to travel to work and has saved an awful lot of shoe leather.

Benefits