When I need help finding something in the grocery store I generally don’t ask because it gives me a chance to browse (I like grocery shopping for some baffling reason). Most of the time I find the item I’m looking for, but those few times I cannot locate the desired article, an intelligent looking employee is queried by yours truly and the search is ended.

It’s great to get good help. It is also nice to go into a grocery store where everything is laid out logically, clearly, and along wide isles. I like to arrange my shopping list according to the layout of the store being shopped, but usually my wife makes the list–she’s an artist and her lists have me walking the length of the store numerous times.

I love my wife and I probably married her because my subconscious wanted some disorder in my life, and I don’t mind grazing in a grocery store. However, there is only so much lack of logic I can handle, like the web access hot spot at Starbucks in Newmarket, Ontario.

Before I tell you about that, I need to tell you why I was in Starbucks trying to access my email. In my opinion it was an epic tragedy, but you, dear reader, will find it a comedy of errors.

At five o’clock last Friday, the start of Canada’s Thanksgiving long weekend, I left to pick up my daughter. We had arranged to meet one another an hour and a half away at a friend of hers parent’s house, instead of the four hours to her University town. The arrangements included an email from my daughter that outlined the (mostly correct) directions to the road on which her friend lived, but not the street address or the phone number.

I didn’t read the email in detail until I got to Newmarket. I got all the way to the wrong road (yes, I read the directions correctly) and discovered that there was no street address.

Easy solutions to such a situation abound in our modern technological society. For example, I could have text messaged her, called her cell phone, emailed her from a cell phone, or in the worst case scenario I could email her from my laptop. Well, it did get worse–I forgot my cell phone at home.

So, I get a phone card at a local drug store, and attempt to phone her cell. She didn’t tell me that her cell had been stolen a week earlier, and she was still waiting for a new one. I get a not in service message.

OK, so make another phone call to her home at University. She has an old style answering machine which cannot be accessed from outside her house. I leave a message anyway in case one of her roommates hears it, though I know they have all gone off home for the holiday.

I have my laptop with me, so off to Starbucks where they have a nice welcoming “web access hot point” sign on the front door. I grab my laptop bag, find a seat, swing open the screen, click on the start button, log onto my user account, and double click the Internet Explorer icon. Up pops the “connect” screen that you see at so many hot spots.

This is where the illogic starts.

I click the “connect” button, and am asked for my card number. The choices are using a credit card or using a Bell access card. I don’t have a Bell access card (no, a phone card is not the same as an access card), so I click on the credit card option.

OK, now concentrate.

In order to use my credit card, I have to provide my email address where the link to confirm who I am is sent. I need to click this link in order to get access to the internet and my email.

I don’t have access to my email!!!!

Fine. I ask a nearby Starbucks employee, who looks intelligent, and she knows nothing about the Internet connection. She asks another employee who says I need a wireless card in my computer to get online. I try to explain that I already have a wireless card, and what I need is a Bell access card.

This confuses them, and they don’t sell the cards there. I thank them for their help and drive back to the road where I think my daughter is starting to get worried. No, she isn’t waiting outside pining for me.

My next step was to park outside some hotels, but they all required login passwords. The nerve! So, I go into the lobby of one and offer to pay for access, and am outright refused. After trying to explain my situation, the clerk is adamant about maintaining policy.

Hmm, what should I do now? It’s two hours after I arrived in that town, half an hour late in the first place. Right in front of me is a mall. I go there and find a Bell Phone Centre. That’s it, I foolishly thought, the solution to my problem!

“Excuse me,” I say to the clerk, looking prematurely relieved. “I’d like a Bell access card for the Internet.”

“Yes, right over here,” she says, and shows me a wireless access card.

“Oh, no,”  I reply, politely.  “I’m looking for the card I need to access the Internet at Starbucks.”

“Oh, you have to get those at Future Shop or Best Buy,” she explains. “They  are called wireless network cards.”

My patience starts to run out, but I try. “Perhaps you misunderstand me. I am looking for the Bell access cards that Starbuck’s web access home page is looking for. The help screen said it’s a card with letters and numbers on it, similar to, but not, a phone card.”

To her credit the clerk scrambled around the shop asking other clerks what the heck I was talking about. After being told, over and over again, that I needed a wireless PC card to access the internet, and explaining (over and over again) that I have a wireless card, that I know what I’m talking about, and detailing how stupid they were, I voluntarily left before they could kick me out.

Desperately, I drive along Main Street Newmarket in hopes of finding an Internet Café. There! A monitor on a table. I stop, run in, and see instead a TV. So I ask some inebriated clients, who, well, are too inebriated to provide a decipherable answer. I ask the bar tender, who tells me there is no such thing as an Internet Café in Newmarket, but that if I have a laptop with a wireless network card, I can use his personal connection that I can access by sitting at the top of the stairs outside his apartment above the bar.

He is more knowledgeable about wireless connectivity than the Bell clerks!

I run up the stairs, laptop in tow, and flip through the “get to my email” routine. Finally, I’m connected, and hit send and receive. Yay, I have sent an all caps email to my daughter explaining my predicament.

I wait a couple of minutes with no reply. So, I go up and down the (wrong) street again, and this time I start knocking on doors of houses where the lights are still on. No-one knows of anyone’s daughter who goes to the same University as my daughter. Eventually an older couple ask how they can help, and when I explain that I just need to access my email, they log me onto their computer, I connect to the Internet, and low and behold, a reply from my daughter. I discover that I’m on the wrong road, but the right road is close at hand.

Finally, I find my kid–too happy to see her to be angry. I’m given a cup of tea and a butter tart by her friend’s parents. We put her bags in the car, look at a map for the fastest way home, and choose the most logical route.

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