French publishing boss Gauthier Toulemonde - whose last name gives him the underserved title of 'Mr. Everybody' - proves you can live and work almost as effectively on a desert island, with some hi-tech equipment and a lot of courage, reports The Guardian.
Have computer – and internet connection – work anywhere. So goes the cost-cutting corporate human resources mantra.
Even on an uninhabited coral island in the middle of nowhere?
To the dismay, perhaps, of office workers everywhere, Frenchman Gauthier Toulemonde has returned to civilisation to report that it is indeed possible, though not necessarily desirable nor particularly cheap, to relocate staff "offshore".
Until six weeks ago, Toulemonde, a businessman, journalist and former banker, was inclined to agree with the received wisdom that workers, given the right equipment, can labour more or less anywhere.
Being adventurous as well as entrepreneurial, however, he decided to put the theory to the test and at the same time fulfil a childhood dream of living like a modern-day Robinson Crusoe.
"Who hasn't dreamed of going to a desert island, to get away from it all, to go on an adventure. For me it was a childhood dream. When I'm big I'll leave, I told myself, but as an adult obliged to work to live and subject to the numerous constraints of modern life, I realised it was complicated," he wrote in his blog.
But a year ago, fed up with commuting from his home in the northern French city of Lille to Paris, Toulemonde, 54, decided to relocate his job as the head of a publishing business to an uninhabited island in the middle of nowhere for several weeks.
"I found myself in Gare Saint Lazare in Paris just before Christmas watching the continuous stream of people passing by," he told the Guardian. "They had this sad look on their faces, even though they were carrying Christmas presents. It had long seemed to me absurd this travelling back and forth to offices.
"My idea of going away had been growing for a while, but it was on that day, I decided to leave."
It took six months to identify a suitable island, a 700-by-500-metre island in the Indonesian archipelago (the Indonesians made him promise not to reveal its exact location) 10,000 miles from Paris, and a few more months to prepare.
On 8 October, he left his home in Lille with four towel-sized solar panels, a windmill, a laptop computer, a tablet computer and two satellite phones. He was also carrying two tents to protect him, and the equipment from the humidity and the seasonal heavy rains.
Gecko, a borrowed dog, "rented" from a Chinese businessman came too to scare off local wildlife that included rats and snakes.
Toulemonde, who had a budget of €10,000 (£8,300) for the adventure, including €20 a day for internet, said he wanted to be the world's first "Web Robinson".
"I wanted to show how with solar energy and new technology, we can live differently and work from far away cutting out all the time lost in commuting," he said.
"The Anglo-Saxon world is far more open to this idea of distance working, but there is a resistance to it in France."
He added, that the adventure was no holiday: "I had a business to run, and had to deal with suppliers, banks, clients. The aim was to show I could do this on my own from far away."
Read more of this report from The Guardian.