tap tap...this list still live?

I'm doing a consulting job on behalf of my employer and am wondering if 
the following is unusual/standard.

Nearly all the consulting work I've done, either on my own or for work, 
has been for businesses hundreds or thousands of miles away, so working 
remotely was a given.

This current client is local and insists that I come to their location and 
use a desktop PC (running windows...ick) that they've designated for my 
use.  They (several of them) also like to hang over my shoulder and watch 
everything I do.  This is slightly annoying, but also somewhat helpful in 
that when I have questions ("Why the hell is this like this?") I can just 
turn my head and ask one of them.  Unfortunately, the most frequent answer 
is "I don't know.  Should it be done differently?".

Being used to working in X, with a large virtual desktop capable of 
displaying a few terms and a browser simultaneously, I find a small 
desktop on windows pretty constraining and inefficient.

The onsite part is also annoying/limiting in that I'm out of the office 
(cut off from email, the phone, and generally unavailable if anything but 
a major disaster comes up), and unable/(really just unwilling) to ssh out 
to other systems in order to rely on work done elsewhere to see how things 
might be done.  i.e. they're a good candidate for some 3rd party software 
I've installed for other customers on systems we (work) manage for those 
customers.  Normally, from my desk, I might log into one of those systems 
and simply copy&paste sections of config rather than write a new one from 
scratch.  Maybe that's being lazy...but to me it just seems more 
efficient.

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  Jon Lewis                   |  I route
  Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
  Atlantic Net                | 
_________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________