The Pirates Of The Airwaves

My family has apparently become more dependent on the internet than any of us cares to admit, myself included. In fact, when I learned that our reunion house would be WiFi-challenged I got hives and a strange feeling of foreboding came over me. After all, even airplanes, rest areas, and for all I know, national parks are getting WiFi now.

Between my blogging, Facebooking, Tweeting, emailing, surfing, "syncing to the cloud", and RSSing, I have come to rely on a big steady drink from the internet firehose. And reunion of all times...just when I have lots to show and lots to tell, my digital voice gets laryngitis. Even "Plan B", the phone system, was spotty and iffy.

Ahh, but we are engineers, accountants, artists, professionals, parents...smart people. We immediately began combing the area for loose and unsecured lifelines to the outside world.

And we found them. They were weak and unreliable, but we found them nonetheless.

Personally, I feel a great deal of respect and personal debt to a woman named Ms. Wefflaufer in #23, who played very free and loose with her bandwidth in the morning hours. Brian and some of the others who dwelled upstairs had more of an affinity for "shwartz", whose signal was stronger up in those airy parts.

One morning Zach and I took our portable WiFi devices out to go "divining" for signals. We found #23 and the connection was very strong as we neared her porch. But suddenly Ms. W herself came bursting outside with a very large black dog in tow and there was an awkward moment as Zach and I were caught standing in her doorway with our instruments held up in our hands, Ghostbusters-like, looking for all the world like we were scanning her place for radio signals. Which of course we were. She either didn't realize what we were up to or didn't care, and shot us a nervous smile as she proceeded down the path with "Killer" for a nice walk.

Not all was easy in the shady world of pirated bandwidth though. Many of the signals we got were locked down and no amount of guessing passwords ("beach house", "condo", "default") got us access.

I think we pretty much all agreed that next year, internet will be high on our list of required attributes for a house, and for me it's right up there with "toilet", "stove", and "being near a beach".