South Southeast by Southwest, Part I

I have to vent over my quest to get a wireless internet connection in Anthem, Arizona. I thought Starbucks offered this service, so long as you buy something. I wanted a mocha anyway, so I found one at the corner of two of Anthem’s many identical boulevards (which are not laid out in a simple grid, by the way, but meander like coyote trails, no doubt to make the brand spanking new suburb seem a little less like a brand spanking new suburb). Stood in line awhile and then asked if they had a functioning wireless. Only if I had a Starbucks card, quoth the barista. I don’t buy memberships so, no, I had no card, and I left feeling very annoyed that the silly woman could at least have tried to sell me one, or clarify that I’d get access for free if I bought something, or otherwise been encouraging. But no! All she could do was suggest the library. Libraries generally don’t serve food and drink. So I went back to my cousin’s house to search again.

Right, my cousin has internet, but not wireless, and for reasons too obscure for me to grasp, when I connected the RJ45 on the back of her cable modem to the RJ45 on the side of my laptop, a network was detected but never connected, and I was simply never able to do what I needed to do. Which was mate my work machine to the net and get a VPN going and do some triage on a couple days’ worth of work email. Really wanted to spend a lot of time doing that.

“Wireless network anthem az” netted me a possibility in the form of a café at the local Safeway. All right, I could do work at a grocery store, why not. I meandered along the coyote trails at a crawling forty miles an hour really enjoying the fact that Maricopa County had decided to impose a thirty five mile an hour speed limit on roads that could easily support eighty, and eventually, after many long hours passing decoratively transplanted saguaro cacti, found the Safeway and the Starbucks within. I asked if the wireless worked, the guy said probably, so I tried and sure enough caught a signal. Fool optimist that I am, I bought a venti mocha and a piece of pumpkin cake and sat down to enjoy my breakfast while wrestling with warning pages and out of date certificates and all manner of general network dysfunction. Money well spent! The workers had no idea. But by now I had eaten something and decided the library was worth a try.

I had a vague idea it was down this way and indeed I found it, nestled within the grounds of the local high school. I didn’t feel like waiting in line at the information desk so I took one of the plush little reading chairs in back and found a network and enjoyed the familiar experience of warning pages and invalid certificates. I went back hopefully to the help desk line and at my turn was told that indeed their wireless worked fine, I just needed to have a library card. All out of quibble, I bought a thirty-day one for five bucks, was given some codes and instructions, and, nestled back in my corner, was finally able to plug in to the employer matrix.

As usual, about a dozen things had blown up since I left the office late Wednesday afternoon, and by the time I had addressed a few of them well over an hour had passed and my enthusiasm for doing work while on vacation was getting thin. So now it is noon, I am back at my cousin’s house, and everyone is either out getting their toenails done or lying around fast asleep. I guess that’s standard for mid-day in Arizona. Well, I’m on vacation, and the idea presumably is to relax. But my nerves are humming like harp strings. Only one thing to do: Get a beer, find a cool place, damage my eardrums with the very loud music stored on my netbook (I don’t own an MP3 player), and read the Raymond Chandler short stories I brought along. That’ll do me, for a little while.