It was a bananas day at work today. Serious bananas. But that's another story.
Then I came home and The Hater took me to supper. Our friend and virtual little brother came with us. He does that. It works for the three of us. And tonight was another exciting evening at Chili's.
My little brother mentioned having wireless internet at his house, which I questioned because I thought that was one of the reasons he came to our apartment to visit. He said it was actually his neighbor's wireless that wasn't password protected. So it was kindof free.
He thought a minute to make an analogy that was similar to something else in real life, but laughed instead. The Hater laughed instead. I ate chips. I like chips and salsa. They talked about how it was really like stealing but not.
Then there was silence. They were both trying to think of an appropriate analogy.
* At this point I would like to say that I'm trying to get them to relive the situation to make a better story. They're playing NCAA football on the XBox and not cooporating. They're arguing over who had the worse idea and not helping me. So I'd like to go on the record as saying that they had the chance to help me tell the story and chose to lead Oregon State to beat Washington instead.
Suffice it to say that they weren't coming up with anything.
I asked if it was the same as a library, where you could go read books for free, but to take them out of the library you had to register and have a library card. ... And although it's not the same, it was a really good analogy.
But no! The Hater became the Analogy Scooge. He shot it down before I could even finish explaining why it was brilliant. Little Brother laughed.
And then Little Brother talked about a man having a lot of land with a secret road that would be a short-cut to the highway. Again, the Analogy Scrooge zaped it with the Ghost of Christmas Past. So I helped Little Brother perm it into a man with land and a 'no trespassing' sign without chains over the drive. It really worked in our head. It was exactly the same as stealing free wireless internet.
Analogy Scrooge cawed. We taunted. Then we voted and won that it was close to the same.
The Analogy Scrooge wanted to say that it would *only* work because part of everybody's land is owned by the government. That even if you owned a piece of land, the government owned the curb.
Little Brother appeased him, saying that it was like walking across someone else's sidewalk if they had a 'no trespassing' sign in the yard. Except Analogy Scrooge went scrooge on him and didn't like it.
And I renamed him the Analogy Scooge. He didn't like it. And since I was raised to be a good instigator, I choose to remind him of it here.
* If you're keeping up with the whole genderist family tree, remember that Little Brother isn't really our brother. But Sister, is my sister. Zoloft is the cat. She remains to be the most sweet and brilliant cat in the universe.
* And Little Brother doesn't like his name, but he won't give me an appropriate other choice. The Hater says we should call him DB, for Douche Bag, but I think that's too mean.
* Little Brother thinks that "The Hater" is a very appropriate name for the Analogy Scrooge. And he says that The Hater is a DB.
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5 comments:
That was a fantastic post.
I agree that trespassing is the most appropriate analogy for what we're dealing with here. However! There is such a thing in the legal world as an "easement by prescription." Basically, it means that if you keep trespassing on someone land long enough, you eventually gain the legal right to use it. (There's a similar concept called "adverse possession," where if you start living on someone's land, after a while you legally own it.)
So, really, the analogy would tell me that it's only stealing until it's not. Just like prescriptive easements.
And for those of you thinking about the family tree,
that's The Lawyer
(if the prescriptive easements didn't give it away).
If he had been at the table eating with us, he and I would have had complete conversations with glances and told jokes without actually saying anything. If you've not played on his website yet, shame on you.
I sort of think of it more like his neighbor has a really good collection of CDs and plays them loud enough so that you, in the next apartment over, enjoy them (even if he doesn't know you're listening). WiFi is just electronic information being broadcast, am I right?
CDs gets close. But you're stuck listening to what they are..
However!
If the neighbor had a ginormous-screen TV that you could see from the road, and you went out and invested $10 on a universal remote (with enough range), sitting on the curb watching her TV when she wasn't home (maybe turning on PiP when she -is- home so you both can watch at the same time).. it'd be similar.
PiP more-so, because while she could still watch what she wanted, it'd be slightly less good an experience as when she was only watching her own program, which is the same as your little brother using up her bandwidth...
But, PiP is pretty noticable; bandwidth not so much.. and therein lies the however.
Two points to Loki for using my phrase of the day.
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