"Back off, doll, I've got the ticket right here." She lowered the phone, and I explained the situation. She set up her machine, punched in a five-letter password, and connected from her Android. "It works," she said. "You are going to get massive rock star status for this one, Fleishman."

I explained to her that it also works with the original AirPort Base Station, which can only run WEP, and with WEP enabled on newer (2003 and later) base stations set to use that standard. While I was used to the AirPort Base Stations pushing up daisies through a power-supply failure a few years into operation, my friend still could "see" two across the street from her office. "We're a public college, Fleishman. We use what we have."

And if the 5- or 13-character ASCII password trick didn't work, I had another tip. In the software base station in Mac OS X, by using a dollar sign--thank you, Uncle Sam--in front of a series of 10 or 26 hex digits for 40- or 128-bit WEP. For instance:

$A0B1C2D3E4

On an Android phone, under Windows, or elsewhere, you type that sequence in omitting the dollar sign as: