I had a 15 minute discussion tonight with someone who needs a serious beating.

He’d checked into a hotel and purchased a 1 megabit connection to the internet. That’s working fine, and he was able to surf for porn or 14 year old girls in chat rooms or whatever it is the desperately stupid do late at night in the middle of the week in a hotel room.

The trouble is that he’s not getting the one meg, and he wants to know who to complain to. Sure, he keeps saying he doesn’t want to complain, but if that were the case, why would he be calling? He would have been saying things like “it’s not the money, it’s the principle” had I been able to stomach his round-and-round any longer. As it was I had to put him off on another of the guys here who enjoys talking to morons.

See, he’d been sent to downloads.com to try a download to see how his connection was doing.

He pulled down a large file at a sustained 380k per second.

Do you see a problem with this? Sure, if you ignore reality and focus on the numbers 1,000,000 and 380,000, which he feels is a fair comparison. He doesn’t understand overheads, the difference between a bit and a byte, or even really what the hell he’s doing on the internet. I mean, he wants to read his EMAIL. That’s it (well, and download porn, but that’s another story…)

I started explaining the math of the situation, but he got me confused and I contradicted myself. Apparently this guy was a lawyer … “HAH! You said bits!”

Moron.

So, basically his argument was that we should place a disclaimer on the in-room merchandising that states that “you may or may not achieve these theoretical speeds that you’re paying for!” The end user doesn’t need to know anything about what’s going on, or how to compare apples against kumquats, we need to put warnings on things.

Caution! Licking this electrical socket may cause brain damage!