Problemet med beduiner i et sandfyldt cyberspace i den globale landsby, dér … er at de rejser ved lave hastigheder.

(Den mere hæderligt gennemskrevne variant af dette post ville indeholde noget om at diskussionen er gammel efterhÃ¥nden, at der bestemt kunne være bedre wifi i byen — ogsÃ¥ de mindre, at det kunne have nogle politiske konsekvenser MEN at kulturen til gengæld er mere end udbredt, har været en del af min og masser af andres virkelighed i Ã¥revis og at selv de mest teknikforskrækkede ejere af kokainhvide MacBooks hver dag kæmper om pladserne pÃ¥ Københavns cafeer med digitale entreprenører og andet godtfolk. Og inden man fortaber sig i klicheerne, sande eller ej, om den danske lønmodtagermentalitet, bør man nok huske at selvstændige ikke er sat i verden for at presse wifi-udviklingen i en bestemt retning, men at det forhÃ¥bentlig forholder sig modsat. Og sÃ¥ kan man jo lige feje for egen teltdør først…)

So I ordered one way before christmas and waited. And waited. And waited some more. Ok, maybe some contact was needed. So I contacted them. Waited. Waited more. Contacted again. And again. The third time, a message in their website from hell (seriously, this is 2007) said they’d been having some trouble and anyone that haven’t heard from them should try again. So I did. More waiting. Still nothing.

I’m not sure if I tried again or if that was the time where I decided to look elsewhere for help. In their forum, it seemed that a FON employee was pretty present. I signed up, hoped that all the complaints about the manual activation from the FON staff were about everyone else but me and hoped for the best.

I still haven’t heard anything. Leaving me with no FON router, apparantly no way — at all — to get in touch with FON. And a pretty bad experience with what was supposed to be their customer support. One thing is their website that is close to useless as they’ve obviously gone for some standard ordering setup that makes it wuite hard to input an address that’ll make sense to the poor delivery guy (which is probably what happened to my router). But it’s far worse that something as simple as an email doesn’t get answered. Come on people, play ball.

If I believed that a second order would be of any help to my situation, I would gladly pay the few dollars a router costs. That’s not the point. The thing is…I don’t. Just as I havent’t been bothered to help my mom get a replacement for the one she actually _did_ receive but appeared to be broken. Too much work…

All this just to say, that even if you do run a successful company that’s probably drowning in logistics and support requests and what have you, ignoring your customers hurt you. Make sure you’re set up properly before opening your doors.

Beta on web apps, sure. Beta on customer support and logistics, no way.

WPA password reqired. Ok, I text the owner of the flat, she never heard of a password, “it just works” from her desktop machine. Of course, I’m at a hacker conference so in theory I could get this to work one way or the other with a little help, but my point is this: When people visit you, if you’re there yourself or not doesn’t matter, they want to get online. The beauty of wifi is that it’s so easy to share. If you have passwords at hand.

I’m doing a password painting once I get home in case I forget to leave the necessary details.

(I got it to work without breaking any laws, don’t ask.)

Everyone I talked to were online with no trouble at all and gave me the password. That’s when it dawned on me: I wasn’t prompted for one, so maybe it was saving the password from last time I was here.

Correct. They changed the password, but for some reason OS X didn’t think it was important to prompt me for a new one once the saved one failed. I had to go to my keychain, delete the entry for Morena and try again, this time allowed to punch in the new password. Success.

Seriously, why does it have to be so hard? Password doesn’t work? Ask for another one. Don’t just go “sorry, bad luck” on me…