Great Balls Of Fire

Our allotment for our computer usage is minimal partly because of the cost, and partly because I don't like the satellite company, and I don't want to give them any more money. I cannot stream videos and I rarely use YouTube or look at videos that people put on their blogs and FB because it whittles away the megabytes. So does Pinterest, dammit.

As such we monitor our daily allowance because when there are "break-ins," the allotment goes very quickly. The only way to solve this problem would be to hard-wire the computers to the modem, but that's not going to happen.

We have always speculated the culprit was "Coexist." That's our neighbor's friend bumper sticker on her white car. Whenever "Coexist" arrived, if we didn't unplug our WiFi equipment, we would lose our allowance. When she got married to our neighbor, this problem stopped. We suspected she got her own internet connection. That lasted a year.


This summer we have been getting ripped off on most weekends, and we went back on alert.

One Sunday morning I noticed Mrs. Coexist was sitting on her deck with a laptop. She was with a friend who had a laptop too. So real quick like a bunny I turned off the AirPort, and super casually I strolled out to my garden penetrating deep into the corn patch. Within earshot I hear a conversation that went something like this. "Yeah, first you go here to get on, then you can download movies...hmm that's weird. It stopped."

So I summoned all the balls I have and walked over to her deck, and said in the nicest way, "Excuse me! What provider do you have for your internet?" Well, she didn't know. "Some phone company." I explained that I have a satellite and someone has been ripping me off by stealing my allotment. Her friend said, "You should call the company. They shouldn't allow that!" So I looked at my neighbor, and she had the textbook face of guilt written all over her.

Guess what? No problems since.

It's good to have balls sometimes.