Sneaker-Net to the Rescue

Yesterday I had an online training course to attend. The course used a special plug-in for WebEx and my Mac just didn't want to load it. I borrowed a department laptop and spent several minutes getting it set up for the training course.

The first thing I noticed is that the borrowed laptop didn't have the WiFi network set up correctly. Getting on the corporate network required a trip to our IT department. Since I didn't want to do that, I just got onto our guest network. The only problem is that I couldn't reach any of our internal servers. Since I just needed to get to WebEx this shouldn't have been a serious issue except for the fact that I needed to copy a very lengthy URL from my e-mail to get into the course.

After playing around for a few minutes, I did what I used to do 25 years ago before ubiquitous WiFi: I pulled out portable media. In the past, this used to be a floppy disk but yesterday I used a thumb drive or memory stick. I copied a small text file to the stick from my e-mail laptop and then moved it to the loaner laptop. When it came time to join the training course, I simply copied the URL from the small file and I didn't have to worry about manually typing it into my browser. Once the class ended, I returned the laptop.

There are a number of different solutions to most problems. Sometimes we get so fixated on using new methods that could easily be solved by taking a step back and thinking a bit before acting. In my case, the most elegant solution actually turned out to be what we used to call Sneaker-Net.