Working in Wodonga Library

 Our new car was due for its 1500km service - the complimentary one where you take it back and they check that nothing has fallen off and it's not started leaking fluid from somewhere it shouldn't.

This had to be done at the Hyundai dealer in Wodonga as that's where we bought it from, so off I trotted this morning to Wodonga.

Now, Wodonga in winter doesn't exactly scintillate. In summer the area round the old train station tries to be funky with cafes and gelato bars but in winter it has all the appeal of a down at heel light industrial park, and the rest of the town is not that much better.

Wodonga lives in Albury's shadow, and we're as guilty as anyone in preferring Albury over Wodonga.

What Wodonga does have is a shiny newly refurbished library, and what's more it's only a ten minute walk from the Hyundai dealer, so I thought I'd try it out.

Well, there's no getting away from the fact it's a library, but it does have a casual area with sofas and tables, a couple of rows of carrells - really more like open plan workstations than the good old coveted university carrells like the ones on the top floor in St Andrews North St Library and doubtless elsewhere - housing the public access computers and a long bench, as well as a couple of alcove type areas for people to sit and work on their own laptops.

The areas were well used, the chairs reasonably comfortable, and amazingly there were power sockets, basically one per seat. No USB sockets to plug in an ipad, tablet, or phone, but they did have good old three pin 240v sockets.

The wifi was one of these portal based solutions and slow to login, but once logged in, performance was adequate if not lightning. Good enough to work on a Google Docs document and to  add a pdf to Evernote, as well as the usual email and website checking.

I'd deliberately taken the Windows based laptop that I use when travelling as a lowest common denominator machine rather than my Chromebook or either of my Linux machines - that's an exercise for another day perhaps.

However, would I use Wodonga Library as a workspace between meetings?

Almost certainly. While there's competition for laptop work areas, on the day I visited there were just enough, though there might be a different story in the run up to school exams, but the desks and chairs were comfortable, and better thought out than Albury City Library where they provide large worktables but for some reason no power sockets...