It’s back in the day when Wi-Fi was relatively new, and pilot fish is visiting relatives over the holidays when his brother-in-law begins grousing about lousy internet performance.

“A friend had set up a wireless access point for him,” says fish. “But he neglected to provide important information like the administrator password so a poor slob like me who came later might be able to take a look and diagnose anything.

“After a reset of the access point and a reconfiguration of the laptop, we came to find that my brother-in-law had never actually connected to the access point in his own house. He had instead been connecting to an unsecured network that one of the neighbors had been broadcasting.

“Turns out he had paid for a cable modem for two years that he never actually connected to.”

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