My Life Without Loosecubes
Part 4: No Pictures Allowed
At the end of last week, I decided it was time to try working out of a coffee shop close to my apartment in Cobble Hill. I didn’t want to waste any time searching for one, so I just went straight to the Starbucks around the corner. It seemed like everyone in my neighborhood had the same idea, and the place was slammed. Not an empty seat in the house. I racked my brain for the next closest place I could think of and remembered that the Barnes and Noble a few blocks north had a Starbucks cafe inside. I darted over and was able to find a small table, but I noticed there were signs explicitly stating the seating was for cafe customers only. Luckily, I was pretty hungry, so it was a great excuse to treat myself to a grilled cheese and bowl of tomato basil soup (which wasn’t half bad).
After I finished my lunch, I powered up my laptop and tried to connect to the internet. Key word: tried. This was the first time all week that I was experiencing wifi woes, and it wasn’t pretty. I could see the network, but my computer wasn’t connecting. I turned my airport off and on again, restarted my computer, and did everything else I’ve ever been instructed by an IT professional to do. I eventually figured out that I had to play around with my network settings, which seemed odd to me since I had no problems connecting to other public networks all week.
My experience only went downhill from there. About an hour after my initial internet problems, I noticed that my airport was struggling to detect the connection again. I was able to apply the solution I discovered earlier, but not before I lost a few e-mails I was working on. That was also around the same time I realized my power was low, and there wasn’t an outlet in sight. Great.
On my way out, I turned to snap a few photos when I noticed a man walking briskly towards me. ‘You can’t take pictures in the store, sir.’ ‘Oh. Sorry. I didn’t know.’ The icing on my cake of unproductiveness, further proving that this was no place for me or anyone trying to get serious work done.
