Redneck wants Wi-Fi Booster
Posted by n3rvp4in on July 21, 2008
The morning, first customer of the day, a full blown redneck comes in the store. He says that he is staying at a local campground and is having trouble connecting to the free wi-fi. Well, I did a bid for the guy that owns the campground to upgrade the wireless network. He plugged in a cheap consumer grade wireless router and called it “free wi-fi”. Only problem is that it only covers an area with a 25 ft radius around the campground office. Considering that the campground is over a 1/4 mile square, this is hardly usable by most campers. He didn’t want to spend the money to put in a proper system, but I suppose that he does have wi-fi and its free.
I ask the redneck if he has a laptop of desktop in his camper. Simple question. His response, “What does it matter”? Ahh, a hostile redneck. So I spend the next 10 minutes explaining the differences in the equipment used for desktops and laptops. This is clearly not going well, he keeps asking the same questions over and over. So, he has a laptop. I explain that the equipment that we have will not help him. The laptop cards don’t have “more power” and they don’t have antenna ports. He wants to know why he can’t just buy a wireless extender. Well let’s see. You don’t know the network configuration and you can’t just run around adding things to another person’s network.
Now he can’t believe that with today’s technology, he can’t just show up at a store and buy something that will just automatically boost the wi-fi signal. Holy shit, we got ourselves a smart one. He knows the word “technology”. So I finally tell him that I would be glad to order him something that might help his situation, but I can’t make any guarantees about the effectiveness in solving him problems. So Bubba says, “You guarantee that it will work”. WTF? I just said I don’t know that it will solve the problem, to many “f-a-c-t-o-r-s”. I will have to reevaluate his “learnin’”. Oh well, I will just have to order a bad-ass USB based wi-fi card and antenna and if he returns them, I will buy them for myself.
