A free lunch

So today I went to eat lunch at my favorite healthy restaurant, Life Alive, in downtown Lowell. I brought my laptop in, as they have free wireless Internet access. After turning on my laptop, I was able to connect to the WiFi network and get an IP address, however I had no connection to the Internet. I pointed my browser to http://192.168.1.1 in attempt to see if the configuration page for the router was reset to the defaults; it was. I logged in using the default blank password, and set a password for Life Alive. When I was done eating, I went to the counter to pay for my meal and informed Heidi, the owner, that the wireless network was down, and that it probably lost its ISP configuration. She asked if I wanted to take a look at the router in the back room. I said sure, but after I put a quarter in the parking meter, as it had already been expired for two minutes. I brought in a little network cable with me, plugged my laptop into the router, setup her ISP configuration (DSL), and had her WiFi network up and running in 5 minutes. As I left the back room and headed to the register to pay for the meal, she said it's on the house for fixing the WiFi.

As I walked out, I thanked her and thought about how cool it was that I just earned my $10 meal (food + coffee) in 5 minutes, doing something I love. Wouldn't it be nice to earn a free lunch like that every day!