[OA Staff Member]

OfficeArrow is located in the heart of midtown Atlanta. Sounds pretty sexy, right? Except on a good day, the commute from an outlying suburb could be anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes. And that’s just going about 20 miles out of town! Add to that the Georgia Department of Transportation’s never-ending list of projects that have begun in this area and you start to see where tele-commuting is the idea of the century. I’ve found an excellent new widget created by Progressive Insurance. From Progressive:
The Widget delivers Traffic.com® personalized, up-to-the-minute traffic information to your desktop. Simply select the routes you want to keep an eye on and the Widget does the rest.
Something like this would have been invaluable to me last night as I was racing towards home in time to pick the little ones up from daycare (otherwise they extort money from me to get them back and they’re both still kind of small and cute so I am prepared to pay for them). Minutes into my commute, it was obvious there was T-R-O-U-B-L-E on the interstate. Lo and behold a major accident about 2 miles ahead. Using the widget, I could have taken a different route home. Think what a hero you’ll be when you can tell your boss not to take the “normal” route to his mid-afternoon meeting, because you’ve run the route using the widget and found an accident that will delay the trip by hours.
The best way to download the widget is to go to Yahoo Widgets and follow the simple directions to download the widget. If you haven’t already, you’ll first be asked to download the Yahoo installer. This takes a few seconds then you can download the Traffic widget, which took several minutes to download. Once downloaded there are clear, helpful directions to get you started. You enter your morning and evening commutes and then have the option to automatically have the widget check the commute 10 minutes before you leave to either go home or go to work.