This was in my Google Reader under the suggested items I might like feed. It’s probably the best tech call ever made.

The caller, a woman in California calls in to Leo Laporte’s show The Tech Guy! She mentions that for the last year and a half she’s logged onto a wireless network in her apartment complex but it’s recently disappeared. She’s gone out and got a wi-fi extender in the hopes of getting the signal back, with no such luck.

Leo asks her what he considers a dumb question; does she have an access point? She answers that she does not. Leo goes on to explain that she has to contact an internet provider, get a router and pay for it. “I know that!” she says.

“Did you do that?” Leo asks.

“No…” she trails off.

“You’ve been stealing wi-fi then,” he says.

“It’s not uncommon,” she replies.

“Not…legal,” he answers.

The rest of the clip is Leo explaining that whoever it was that had their network open probably caught on that people were hopping onto it and secured it, or they moved away. He further explained how stupid it is to hop onto unsecure networks but the caller didn’t seem to care.

It sounded like she called hoping that Leo would be able to tell her how she could find the wi-fi she’d been stealing for over a year. He suggested she get her own internet set-up and she complained at the expense. Leo suggests a provider that has DSL for $15 a month but she doesn’t bite. She likely spent more on the wi-fi extender than she would’ve on a legit internet connection.

Maybe this isn’t as funny to non-tech people; but it made me laugh. I thought I’d feel bad for the caller, perhaps she’d be some poor newbie who had just set-up her computer and was hoping to get online. But this woman was purposely hopping onto someone else’s network, stealing the bandwidth they were paying for and then she has the gall to call in to a tech show to complain about it.

I hope the people in her apartment complex wise up and set up their networks securely so that she’s forced out. People like her are the reason I’m happy to not have pursued a career in tech support.

No related posts.