He was delighted by the dumpsters full of plush toys, by the lightly used office furniture, by the technical books and the CDs of last year’s software. The smells were largely inoffensive—Kurt mentioned that the picking was better in winter when the outdoors was one big fridge, but Alan could hardly smell anything except the sour smell of an old dumpster and occasionally a whiff of coffee grounds.
They took a break at the Vietnamese place for coconut ice and glasses of sweet iced coffee, and Kurt nodded at the cops in the restaurant. Alan wondered why Kurt was so pleasant with these cops out in the boonies but so hostile to the law in Kensington Market.
“How are we going to get connectivity out of the Market?” Kurt said. “I mean, all this work, and we’ve hardly gotten four or five square blocks covered.”
“Buck up,” Alan said. “We could spend another two years just helping people in the Market use what we’ve installed, and it would still be productive.” Kurt’s mouth opened, and Alan held his hand up. “Not that I’m proposing that we do that. I just mean there’s plenty of good that’s been done so far. What we need is some publicity for it, some critical mass, and some way that we can get ordinary people involved. We can’t fit a critical mass into your front room and put them to work.”
“So what do we get them to do?”
“It’s a good question. There’s something I saw online the other day I wanted to show you. Why don’t we go home and get connected?”
“There’s still plenty of good diving out there. No need to go home anyway—I know a place.”
They drove off into a maze of cul-de-sacs and cheaply built, gaudy monster homes with triple garages and sagging rain gutters. The streets had no sidewalks and the inevitable basketball nets over every garage showed no signs of use.
Kurt pulled them up in front of a house that was indistinguishable from the others and took the laptop from under the Buick’s seat, plugging it into the cigarette lighter and flipping its lid.
“There’s an open network here,” Kurt said as he plugged in the wireless card. He pointed at the dormer windows in the top room.