Time Off: Precious Moments

Captain's Quarters

When Anne Orr moved into her 35-foot sailboat last September, she weighed anchor on a new way of life.

 "Most people think I'm nuts," says Orr, 43, Senior consultant, Integrated Solutions Network at Watson Wyatt. "I have these very odd living arrangements. As I've joked with Hewitt, I'm definitely a diversity hire."

Orr, who grew up on Lake Ontario near Niagara Falls, NY, has been sailing her whole life. She moved to San Francisco in 1998 when she took a job with Hewitt Associates.

"I got a great apartment, but it was four times what my mortgage had been in Pittsburgh, so it was a bit of a shock to my system," says Orr. She soon realized that the climate was perfect for sailing year-round, and started thinking about living on a sailboat.

Last September, she sent her furniture, including her bedroom and dining room sets, to her niece and nephew, and moved aboard her Freedom 35 docked in San Francisco Bay. Orr, who takes her clients and colleagues out sailing, is clearly comfortable living in close quarters.

In 1995, owning an advertising and marketing firm in Pittsburgh, PA, she had felt burned out and ready for a change. She left her business, rented her house to friends, and bought a van that was no bigger than an electrician's truck. It became her home as she trekked some 40,000 miles back and forth across North  America.

"The one thing I loved about the van was that there was always this moment in the morning when I would get up, have my coffee, and say, 'OK, time to move on to somewhere else. Do I have everything I need?' And I did — it was all right there. I loved that feeling of having everything there, ready to go if you ever got cranky."

After a year of traveling, she consulted for the next two, taking onsite assignments so that she could live in hotels. But her van was still her only home, the place she'd return to in between engagements. The van has since been sold, but Orr dreams of another road trip and doesn't think she'll live on the boat forever.

So, how does she handle bad weather out on the boat? Revealing her outlook on life, she responds, "You just hold on!"

Play Us a Tune on Your Bassoon

Mathew Harvell may be the only consultant to have entered the profession for the love of a bassoon — make that a $30,000 bassoon.

Harvell, 33, is a senior technical architect at CapTech Ventures, an e-business consulting firm in Richmond, VA, who decided in high school that he wanted to be a professional bassoonist. Since the better instruments are expensive and banks don't typically give loans for them, musicians need to come up with the money on their own.

To make ends meet, Harvell taught himself computer programming. He soon thereafter landed a job as a programmer with Washtenaw County, MI, and worked as the head of intranet development at Owens & Minor in Virginia before getting hired at CapTech last August. In his spare time, he today performs for various symphonies, including the Virginia Symphony in Norfolk.

Harvell juggles consulting and music not out of necessity, but out of desire. He works 45 to 50 hours a week for CapTech, and practices or performs for at least three hours a day.

"Being a musician, you get one shot, basically," says Harvell. "You're up there on the stage, and if something goes wrong, everybody knows. I try to bring that same aversion to error to the consulting world."