The joy of 'free' WIFI

Ok I'm on holiday. Customers however are not and when problems appear a free wifi hotspot is godsend. That is until you try it ..

So the place I'm staying in has 'free' wifi! Simple... but then nobody knows the password... A few attempts at obviouse ones proves futile. So off to the local town APT, and I find a 'free' wifi hotspot (thanks to netstumbler on my iPhone) at the Pub St'John but despite many beers, connection attempts and reboots i could not connect either via my trusty MacBook pro or my iPhone 3g, everybody else however was tapping away just fine.

Back up to the local village (Saignon) and the beautiful Auberge du Presbytere with 'free' wifi (and more drinks).
At last a connection! Or so I thought. I never realised how much movement a waiter made, as every time he walked in and out of the building the wifi signal
disappeared!

Like a bizzare time and motion study keystrokes, connection attempts
and file uploads had be timed precisely to waiter movements. However with minutes of battery life remaining and little hair left to be pulled out the job was at last done.

Lessons learnt 'free' wifi costs, in my case £36 of drinks & 2 hours
of fraustration.

Oh why do they never say free power as well as free wifi?