Improvisation: A Troubleshooting Story (Premium)

Last Friday, I flew home from Seattle and spent a single night in our old apartment before waking up early Saturday to move. That sounds simple enough, but so much happened in just the time span described in that sentence. And there is a little bit of improvisation in there that I’m particularly happy with.

Granted, it wasn’t just Friday. It’s been a busy—looks at the calendar—two weeks, as it turns out. I flew home from Mexico City two weeks ago tomorrow knowing that I had three workdays and a weekend to perform all my normal daily duties and move as much stuff as possible, one carload at a time, from the apartment we’re leaving to the condo we’re moving to. That I would spend all day Monday flying to Seattle on a two-leg journey that literally took 14 hours door-to-door. That I would have a busy week at Microsoft Ignite between meetings, podcast recordings, and other responsibilities. That my wife would continue the pre-moving activities in my absence, and that I would return to a hollowed-out apartment devoid of most of our non-furniture personal items. That we would move on Saturday, spend most of Sunday unpacking as much as possible, that work would return to normal for three days, and that our kids would fly/drive home for the Thanksgiving long weekend.

Whew.

I wrote about travel last week because my Seattle trip was so different from the way I prefer to travel, and it was a searing reminder of why I do things the way I do. It was the first trip I hadn’t booked myself in, many, many years, and because of the tightness of the schedule, I was determined to fly out of nearby Allentown’s Lehigh International Airport, a 20-minute drive, and not Newark Liberty, from where I could have gotten non-stop flights but with a 90-minute drive.

What I got back from Microsoft’s travel booking service was … well, interesting. A 4-hour layover in Chicago on the way to Seattle and a 45-minute layover on the way home, with all flights on United, the online airline for which I have any kind of status. I accepted immediately because I figured I could simply work from the comfort of a United lounge on the way there.

That worked out, actually: It was a long day, and the layover was closer to three hours because of a delay in Allentown, but it all unfolded as expected. And my experience at Chicago’s O’Hare airport suggested my fleeting layover on the way home wouldn’t be problematic: The gate I landed at was just a few gates away from both the gate I later flew out of and the lounge in which I passed the time. Assuming my first flight left on time Friday—it was the first Chicago flight of the day in keeping with my “fly as early as possible” rule—I’d be fine on the return trip and wouldn’t leave my wife to manage the move on her own the next day.

I felt good about that, sort of. But travel days are always stressful. I sleep poorly the night before, get up even earlier than intended, and then shut off the redundant alarms I set across multiple devices. In this case, I was up around 5 am, had already packed up as much as possible the night before, and ended up heading to the airport a little earlier than expected. (Though that was a moving target: I always do what I think of as “reverse math” before a flight, where I figure out when I should leave based on moving backward from the start of the flight’s boarding time, getting through security, and arriving at the airport. For some reason, I kept coming up with a different departure time.)

Anyway, I arrived at the airport, sailed through Seattle’s horrible security lines after walking for what seemed like a mile, and found the gate early enough that I had time to go into the United lounge which, in what I took as a good omen, was right next to the gate. So I ate the whitest meal I’d ever seen—three hardboiled eggs and some Greek yogurt on a white plate—in the lounge, read some news, and then headed back down to the gate. Where I recorded a quickie podcast with Brad using my phone—which I realize now we never published—and then boarded the plane.

Well, that oversells the ease with which that happened. This flight was “100 percent full,” we were told, and United was eager to gate-check as many bags as possible because there wasn’t going to be enough space for everyone in the bins. And to entice passengers to accept this slight inconvenience, it would allow them to board after Group 2 and before Group 3. Surprisingly, they got a lot of takers.

I was not among them: I was stuck in Group 2 as it was—I have gotten a bit too used to being not just in Group 1, but the first person in line in Group 1, from all our Mexico trips—and nervous that I would have trouble finding space for my bags. Bags that I always carry on regardless, but it was particularly important on this trip because of the tight layover. Listening to the incessant warnings about the lack of space, and watching the Group 1 line grow and grow, I started getting nervous. Was planning on dumping my luggage in the first available bin regardless of its location on the plane.

But it worked out: I was in a mid-plane exit row, and by the time I finally boarded—yes, I was the first person in the Group 2 line, of course I was—I could see that the front bins were all taken but that there was space near my seat. And with that potential issue behind me, I settled into my cramped window seat—the curve of the airplane body intruding on my shoulder space—and focused on the next potential problem. My seatmate.

Before we moved to Pennsylvania, I flew out of Boston’s Logan Airport and had achieved whatever the highest possible status was at the time on JetBlue, an airline I still love and miss dearly. Not only that, but I always sat in the same exact seat on every single flight. And I mean that literally: When I didn’t get that seat on one flight, I waited until the guy who had taken it showed up and explained to him that this was the first time that I hadn’t sat in that seat in 19 flights. He asked me if I wanted to switch seats, to which I replied. “Obviously.” Anyway. That seat was an exit row window seat with extra legroom, which I wanted so I could safely use a laptop with no worry that the person in front of me would jack the seat back, stealing the space I needed to work. And 9 times out of 10, maybe 19 out of 20, no one took the middle seat because JetBlue charged extra to sit in an extra legroom seat. This allowed me to spread out further. It was wonderful.

Well, United isn’t JetBlue and Newark isn’t Boston and nothing is the same. On the way to Chicago, I experienced the curved side of the airplane problem while sitting next to a couple. The man slept the entire way, which was impressive, and the one time I looked over at what the wife was doing, I saw that she was Googling “How to tell when your husband is having an emotional affair.” Yikes. But she was at least normally sized, and so I had dodged a bullet of sorts. I might not be so lucky on the way home: Anyone who has flown a lot has experienced that moment when the 300-pound guy walking down the aisle of the plane is the one who crams his body into the middle seat right next to you. And having experienced that, you dread it happening again.

Anyway, it happened again. Not a 300-pounder, I guess, but bigger than me. And I will say, I surprised myself by immediately deciding to just be nice to this guy, who surely had no desire to be there either. And so I said, “Welcome!” as he sat down. We chatted a bit, he seemed like a good guy. We were in this together. No worries.

Once the flight leveled out, I paid for and connected to Wi-Fi and got to work. I was about 30 minutes in when I noticed my seatmate was fiddling around with the Wi-Fi settings on his Mac. So I asked him if he was having trouble getting online. He was: He had paid for access like I had but couldn’t get online. So I offered to share my Wi-Fi with him. He declined initially but after two different flight attendants failed to help—shocker—I asked again and this time he agreed. So he used my Wi-Fi for the remainder of the flight.

I wasn’t explicitly thinking this at the time, but perhaps I was hoping that this help would pay it forward, so to speak, when I arrived in Chicago: At some point during the flight, I learned that our flight would land at concourse B in O’Hare, which is exactly where my gates were on the previous set of flights. But my flight to Allentown was in concourse F, almost as far as it could be in the terminal. I was in for a long walk. And that meant that I needed the 15 to 20 rows in front of me to deplane efficiently. Something that had not happened when we had landed in Seattle earlier that week.

These are the things that trouble my mind. I tried not to obsess over it, but by the time the plane landed and started its long taxi into the terminal—it seems like planes land two miles from the actual airport at O’Hare—I was getting nervous about the time. And I started doing the reverse math again, backward from boarding time to the cross-concourse walk and the deplaning. It was going to be tight.

In the end, that worked out OK too, though. Yes, I hoofed it through the airport at my fastest walking pace, and yes, it was quite the distance, but I got to the gate about 15 minutes before boarding started, and it was then that I knew I’d get home on time. I had to gate-check my luggage—normal procedure for the small planes that fly in and out of Allentown, but I’d be fine. And I was fine: Chicago to Allentown is about 90 minutes in the air, and though I was next to another big guy for that trip, he was nice as well, and we landed on time before 5 pm. Door to door, that trip would have been about 9 hours.

But it wasn’t door to door. I felt good enough when my wife met me outside security that we headed straight to our standard Friday night restaurant to have dinner, and the first food I’d eaten since my all-white breakfast. (One of the benefits of this diet I’m on is that I’m often not hungry and can skip meals easily.) It was a bit earlier than usual, but I argued that we had a busy day coming up in the morning with the move, and that eating right away and then going to bed early was the right call.

And so it wasn’t until 6:30 or 6:45 that we finally made it back to the apartment. Where I faced the situation that triggered me writing this article. (I had to get to this eventually.) It was too early for bed, and we wanted to listen to music. But my wife had packed and moved almost everything small in the apartment that wasn’t nailed down. And earlier that day, when I was in the air, she had disconnected our router and brought it over to the new place so that Astound (the former RCN) could install it there and enable our Internet access. So we had two or three hours to kill on our last night in the apartment. But no Internet.

No problem, I thought. This is a solvable problem.

The simplest solution would be to simply use the Sonos Move speaker: It’s big and it sounds great all by itself, and it’s semi-unique among our Sonos speakers in that it includes both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity. So it would work fine in our Internet-less apartment. Or it would have, had my wife not already moved it. Had we thought about this earlier, we could have simply picked it up on the way home from the restaurant as the new place is basically on the way.

But we had not. And so my wife suggested that she could drive there and get it. But that would take about 30 minutes, and she’s have to find it in all the boxes, and it seemed unfair for her to have to do that: She had worked hard all week getting us ready for the big move, and she was probably even more tired than I was. No, I would figure out something else. This is my area, after all.

The two big Sonos Play:5 speakers were still in the apartment, sitting useless and silent without Wi-Fi. But these speakers each have a line-in port, so perhaps I could run a headphone-type cord directly from a phone to one of the speakers. (Which would either work as a single speaker or, if I was lucky, as a stereo pair.) And because I knew we had the right cable in the car, I ran out and grabbed it. And only then did I realize that it wouldn’t work: Neither of our phones has a headphone jack, just USB-C. And whatever dongles I have were—wait for it—packed and moved long ago.

But I had the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s with me, as I had brought it along to Seattle: All of my other computers, and all of my tech gadgets, cables, and whatever else had already been moved to the new place. That laptop has a combo mic/keyboard jack. Maybe that could work. So I turned on my phone’s hotspot, woke up the ThinkPad, connected it to Play:5 with the cable, and connected to my phone’s Wi-Fi. After starting a song with YouTube Music, I could only vaguely hear something, turned up the volume, and heard … half of a song. The mono half of one side of something that was recorded in stereo. This wouldn’t work. The Play:5s were out.

My next thought was the TV. We have a Samsung smart TV that’s identical to the one you see behind Brad on First Ring Daily, and I was pretty sure its Sonos Beam soundbar would work without the Sonos networking stuff because it’s hard-wired with HDMI to the TV. And I was also pretty sure, positive almost, that it supported Miracast, in which case I’d be able to wirelessly connect to it with my Pixel. That would be ideal because I have a limited amount of hotspot usage each month, and it would just go against my normal data usage.

But I couldn’t figure that out: I had a vague memory that you had to enable this feature somewhere in the settings interface, but I stepped through every single menu on the TV and didn’t find it. And when I checked for available wireless displays on the phone, only our kitchen-based smart display came up and its sound quality is not good. I also checked from the ThinkPad, but had the same issue: The TV didn’t come up as a wireless display.

I considered just using the laptop: This is something we’d done in Mexico before we got a set of Bluetooth speakers, after all. And the ThinkPad speakers sounded OK. So I held onto that as a backup solution: I could connect the ThinkPad to my phone’s hotspot and just use YouTube Music from the web.

Wait. Could I use my wife’s hotspot? “Hey, how much hotspot data do you get every month?” I asked her, knowing the answer before I even finished saying that. She had no idea. So she started looking it up on her phone while I considered other possibilities.

“Is your computer still here?” I asked her. Yes. “And the display? Is your external display still here?” Again, yes.

Interesting. So I walked into her mostly empty office/spare bedroom and saw what I wanted to see: The HDMI cable that connects her external display to her USB hub. I could use this cable to connect the laptop to the TV, which is connected to the sound bar and thus might offer good sound quality. In a fun twist, the ThinkPad has a built-in full-sized HDMI port, which is increasingly uncommon, so they could connect directly. But I also had that Anker USB-C hub that I always travel with, so I could have used the cable with any PC.

With the ThinkPad connected to the TV and using that as its only display, I tested YouTube Music again. It sounded great: As I had hoped, the Beam soundbar worked normally even without Wi-Fi. Now we were getting somewhere.

I checked in with my wife. Surely, she had figured out how much hotspot data she gets with her account. Nope: She was struggling with Verizon, which is the normal operating procedure, and so I told her to forget it: We would just stream over my hotspot until I ran out of connectivity, and then we would switch to hers. Done and done.

She made a couple of cocktails while I queued up a playlist. All that work had taken possibly an hour, but we were ready to go. And then, literally six minutes into our delayed music night, my phone buzzed.

“You’ve used 80% of Smartphone Mobile Hotspot high-speed data on your T-Mobile plan,” I read out loud from a text message I had received from “889,” laughing at the timing. “At 100%, your Smartphone Mobile Hotspot speed will be limited to 600 kbps until 12/14/2023. Data on your smartphone will still be high speed.”

Well now.

So I tried connecting my phone to the TV over HDMI using that Anker USB-C hub: If I could use my data plan directly—I have 100 GB of premium data per month—I wouldn’t have to worry about hotspot data usage. But no dice: My Pixel 8 Pro either does not support that type of usage or I just couldn’t figure it out. I might have made it work with the iPhone 15 Pro Max but … you know. Packed and moved. So we just kept going. And 5 minutes later, seriously, just five minutes later, I got another text. I had hit 100 percent hotspot usage. Almost instantly, the song that was playing paused midstream.

So we moved on to my wife’s hotspot instead. What could go wrong?

Nothing, for about 60 minutes. But then my wife’s phone buzzed.

“Your 5G Smartphone has 10% remaining of its monthly 15 GB of Mobile Hotspot allowance,” a text message from Verizon read, answering my question from hours earlier about her hotspot limit. “Your hotspot will reset on the 2nd.”

So we kept listening. And 5 minutes later—again, literally 5 minutes later—she, too, hit her hotspot limit and was likewise dropped to the same 600 Kbps. Since there was no difference and I had a higher monthly data allotment, we switched back to my phone. And go figure. It mostly worked fine at 600 Kbps. We listened for another 30 minutes before heading off to bed, on the early side, and with a busy day in front of us.

But I was pretty happy that we found something that worked. It was like a cooking show where there are only certain ingredients but the cooks still need to make something specific, or whatever puzzle-solving metaphor you prefer. A rare example of troubleshooting that was fun and had a happy ending.

We held our next music night on Saturday in the new place and it went a lot better: Here, we have our full complement of Sonos speakers, including the booming Sonos Sub we had never used in the apartment, and terrific Wi-Fi speeds thanks to our three-node Eero Pro 6E system and high-speed Astound data plan.

And God help me, it sounded even better from having struggled with the setup from the night before.