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Panera has good WiFi
Monday, February 13 2017
There had been four to six inches of snow between yesterday afternoon and today, and we needed to shovel out out driveway for two things: Gretchen needed to get out for a lunch date tomorrow, and a load of fuel oil would be arriving some time tomorrow. I dug out a path to the driveway and then continued that path to the road, where I dug out the mountain of snowplow snow (though it was smaller than it appeared from a distance). While I was working on this final bit, Gretchen learned that one of our tenants in the cursed Brick Mansion had fallen and broken a leg (she blamed the failure of a motion-sensor light to illuminate the entire stairway to the basement, leaving open the possibility that she might sue us). Worse even than the small chance of that was that this tenant was the one with a discounted rent so she would shovel the snow and mow the grass. What would we do after the next snow?
I'd just finished my video chat with the IT department when the power failed. According to Central Hudson, the cluster of outages today was due to high winds. But there had been no high winds here. Initially I took advantage of the situation by applying another layer of spackle to the basement door project. But then I had to get back to work. Using my cellphone as a tether to get my laptop onto the internet, I managed to have a meeting with a colleague in fundraising. By that point Gretchen was home from her lunch date.
I needed a real internet connection to do the things I needed to do, so I drove out to 9W, initially going to Home Depot while I was there. I bought a number of things, including cordage and big cable ties to keep in the Prius for the next time some part of the plastic undercarriage needs to be strapped down.
By this point (4:30pm), my preferred provider of public WiFi (Outdated) had already shut down. So I went into Panera (it's not far from Home Depot; 9W is the province of such national retail brands) and quickly ordered a cup of coffee and a bowl of what might've been a vegan vegetable soup had it not pesto in it and had that pesto not contained parmesan cheese. I'm not the sort of vegan who won't eat such things when they're in front of me, but I'm not the sort who would ever order such a thing twice. The soup tasted strongly of vomit, probably because of that parmesan cheese. If I ate that sort of thing all the time, I might not have noticed it. But I've been a vegan for over seven years.
The WiFi in Panera is considerably better than it is in Outdated. But the crowd isn't quite as fun to look at. In any case, I soon learned from Gretchen that the power back home had been restored. But I lingered at Panera anyway; I had a full cup of coffee and was mostly just chatting with colleagues via Slack. There was no necessity for my usual development environment.
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