Some people

Since I've lived at the Marlborough, a beautiful pre-WW II brick building with 110 units, I've been stealing Internet access. With a hefty mortgage and monthly condo fee of more than $500 a month (that inexplicably includes cable but not Internet) I couldn't take one more bill.

For the past five years that I've lived here, I've always been able to get online through an unsecured network. But throughout the years, the network I was using would suddenly disappear from the list of "open networks" that show up whenever I turn on my AirPort.

For a few days, I'd consider getting my own account and have actually called Comcast a few times to do it. But they're such assholes, saying that it will cost $125 just to set up the line, then $65+ a month, I always hang up. Then suddenly, beautifully, another unsecured network will pop up and I'm in business again.

Yet about a month ago our trusty network connection disappeared again and Dave and I have been struggling to get online ever since. Dave found that if you sat on the edge of our bed and held your laptop slightly above your lap, you could get a faint connection. But who wants to live like that?

Dave then followed the connection out our front door, much like a man tracking a metal detector across the beach, and found that if he walked up the stairs outside our door to the ninth floor landing, you could get a strong signal. We've been going up to the ninth floor and sitting in the hallway with our laptops to write email, check the address of a restaurant, or buy something on Amazon ever since. (Yes, I am sitting in the hallway as I write this blog post.)

This is slightly inconvenient, no doubt, but not terrible considering we both have iPhones now and full-time jobs with access to the Internet Monday through Friday at our desks. But the other day I found out just how inconvenient it was for one of our neighbors who berated me for being in her space.

Yesterday I was sitting in the hallway looking up news stories for an international news website I've been moonlighting for when a neighbor came out of her front door, scowled on her way past me to drop her garbage into the trash shoot, muttering that I could get free Internet connection at the Starbucks down the street.

I looked up from my laptop, saw she was the same older woman who had demanded to see my key before letting me follow her into our building even though I had recognized her for years, and shrugged. I went back to my work. I quickly cut and pasted the latest news on the debt ceiling debates into a word document and went back into our apartment to work.

A few hours later after I had written the stories, I went back up to the ninth floor landing to post them to the site. Again, her door opened.

"Oh you again," she said. She paused, glaring at me. "You know, this isn't an office."

I looked up at her unneighborly face, studied her round physique, short cropped hair and guessed she was in her late 50s. A shot of hot anger filled my chest.

"I know," I said. "But our Internet connection isn't working and the only place I can get a signal is up here."

"Well don't you think you should get that fixed?" she said. What a bitch!

"We're working on it," I lied. "Jesus, I didn't think it would be such a big deal."

"There are plenty of other landings where you could work," she said, going back into her apartment and slamming the door.

I finished posting my stories and went back into our apartment to recount the story to Dave. His take? "She's probably one of those bitter divorced women," he said. "Some people get really sensitive about their privacy."

That I understood. But the thing is our carpeted hallways are really long and wide. It's not like I'm blocking the walkway or I'm some riff raff being loud and leaving my trash everywhere for her to pick up. I don't have children who are bouncing balls and yelling down the hall. It's just me and my MacBook sitting cross-legged in the hall for 30 minutes stretches at a time. Geesh, what's the big deal?

Which got me thinking about how we all choose how to react when confronted with a situation that may be a little unusual. Whenever our building manager sees me sitting in the hallway with my laptop, he teases me that Dave has kicked me out. Another neighbor who lives in that hallway struck up a conversation and ended up showing me the new windows she had installed. Yet another has invited me inside her apartment to use her connection from the comfort of her couch.

It doesn't have to be this way! I want to scream to the crabby one who no doubt is going to report me to the front office. Then we'll all get a letter from the office manager saying we aren't allowed to sit in the halls, much like the one we got this winter saying we couldn't leave our snow boots outside our front doors.

Ah, communal living. Some of us embrace it better than others. For now, I've found a pocket in the eighth floor hallway that gets a signal. Just don't tell the woman on the ninth floor. She's sure to call the police.