Working From Home Checklist

Draft a client-ready sanity checklist for a user setting up (or struggling) at home — ordered so each
item proves the layer below it, which turns "nothing works from home" into "item 3 fails," a ticket
the desk can act on. Verify the remote stack before you write; when unsure, ask. Draft only — show me the reply as a draft to review first, and don't send it.

1. Verify the client's remote stack FIRST by checking the client's documentation and past tickets: does remote access go through a VPN (which one), a remote-desktop/virtual-desktop
   portal, or straight cloud apps? Is there a softphone/telephony app remote workers need? Any
   client-specific remote-work policies (approved-device rules, hotspot allowance)? If the access
   model is unknown, ask the technician ONE question — the checklist's spine is the access model.
2. Write the checklist in dependency order, to end-user rules — each item one check, with a
   what-success-looks-like cue and a note-and-continue instruction ("if this one fails, jot it down
   and keep going — then reply with your list"):
   1. Home internet works at all: any ordinary website loads on the work laptop. (Cue: "if even this
      fails, the issue is your home wifi/router — restarting the router fixes most; your provider owns
      the rest.")
   2. Sign-in and MFA: they can sign in to the laptop and approve the phone prompt.
   3. The access layer — exactly the one this client uses: VPN connects, or the remote-desktop portal
      loads and they can open their desktop, or cloud apps simply load. One item, their flavor.
   4. Mail and calendar open and show today's mail.
   5. Files: the documents they use daily open (mapped drive via VPN, or cloud files — per stack).
   6. Phone/meetings: the softphone registers or a Teams test call works (name the actual telephony
      app per docs; skip if the client has none).
   7. How to get help when your work laptop is the problem: the desk's phone number and the
      portal/email reachable from a personal device — because "email the helpdesk" is useless when
      email is what's broken. Pull the correct contact channel from client docs; never invent one.
3. Add two environment notes, brief and practical: work laptops on home wifi are fine (per docs) but
   public/hotel wifi has its own captive-portal trap (one line), and household-bandwidth honesty
   ("video calls stutter when someone else is streaming — closer to the router or a cable helps").
4. Off-ramp framing at the top: "Run through these in order. Most take under a minute. If everything
   passes, you're set. If anything fails, reply with the item numbers that failed — that tells us
   exactly where to look."
5. Assemble per the Email Baseline Standard.

Guardrails: the checklist is stack-specific by construction — a generic list that mentions a VPN the
client doesn't have (or omits the virtual-desktop portal they do) misdirects every failure report.
Dependency order is the product: never alphabetize or reshuffle; each item must prove the layer
beneath. The help-me-when-it's-broken contact channel comes from client docs — never invent a phone
number or portal URL. Keep it to roughly 7 items; extras (monitor, ergonomics, home printer) only if
the ticket asked. No admin steps and no home-router configuration beyond "restart it." Localizable.
The client's documentation is available only when those integrations are enabled.