Houseguests and home networks
Erk. It’s been a while, but I’ve got a good excuse. I’m moving across the planet, from Ottawa to Sydney, and in preparation for this I moved out of my old apartment the other day and into the basement of a friend’s, leaving behind my own DSL connection and home network. Just as I did that, Ken W emailed me asking that I cover the topic of houseguests and WiFi. How topical!
OK, so, here’s the deal. Your duty as a host is to provide as many of the comforts of home as you reasonably can. Your duty as a guest is to adapt to your host’s home without complaint, and to thank them properly afterwards.
In the shelf-full of etiquette books which I’ve recently packed into a box in preparation for shipping, they all talk about what to provide for guests. They’re mostly unanimous on towels and soap, and some of them suggest such things as a bottle of cologne on the dressing table (hey, it was 1870, I guess that makes sense) but none of them mention Internet connectivity.
You’re a geek. You have a home network, don’t you? Well, offer it to your guest. Share your WiFi keys as you share your house keys. Find a spot on your overcrowded hub just as you’d help them with a car parking space. And do it as soon as practical after the guest arrives — because if the guest’s anything like me, they want to check their email probably even more urgently than they want to shower or eat.
I’ve always experienced perfect hospitality in this regard when visiting other geeks, and I hope that Ken W is asking more out of general curiosity than as the result of some difficult visiting experience. On the whole, it’s guests on a network who are more likely to break the etiquette rules.
When you’re a guest on someone’s home network:
- Don’t suck too much bandwidth — check with your hosts about any download likely to take more than a few minutes
- Don’t use any network resources outside your own laptop (printers, other PCs, etc) without checking with your host
- Don’t unplug any electronics without asking — lamps and other appliances in the guest room are fair game, however, if you need to charge up.
- Don’t spend the whole visit head down, bathed in the light of your laptop screen. Your hosts presumably invited you because they enjoy your company.
When you’re done visiting — and this applies to any visit, regardless of Internet access — be sure to thank your hosts for their hospitality. At minimum, do this verbally as you leave. “Thank you for letting me stay, I had a great time.” Among couch-surfing geeks, this is the lowest common denominator of civility: any less is outright rude. If you’re staying in a family home and have your own guest room, or if your hosts have cooked meals for you, a little more is probably in order: a small gift such as chocolates or a bottle of something nice, or an old-fashioned thank-you note (especially if you’re staying with someone’s parents). Handwrite and snail mail your thank-you note, as emailed ones only get half points, if that. And on all occasions, if you are able to, it is a good idea to offer hospitality in return. “If you’re ever in Ottawa, let me know. I’d love to have you come and stay at our place.”
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You almost hit it with the comment about asking when doing large downloads, but:
In countries where bandwidth isn’t universally cheap (.au and .nz spring to mind here) it’s highly possible that some people have $/MB bandwidth, and that whilst they’re fine with you reading your e-mail and /. even 5MB of download may be more then they’re willing to pay for (That’s AU$1 on some of the connections I manage, while not much on its own it does add up quickly)
I think it should be added that bringing Viruses is an absolute No-No.
Make absolutely sure you are virus-free before plugging anything into that ethernet-jack.
Yes, it is mostly out of curiosity. :)
I’ve actually had the largest problems when visiting pseudo-geeks. One, in particular, told me outright that he wouldn’t give me his (*cough*turned down to 40-bit because it’s faster*cough*) WEP key. I was almost offended enough by that and other ettiquette violations to set up a brute-force tool and tell him the key the next day.
Almost.
Thankfully, the urge to be a gracious visitor, even in the face of bad manners on the part of the host, overruled the urge to be a dick.
Letting someone use your home network is a touchy issue for some. I guess it comes down to knowing how cluefull the person you’re sharing - you could say entrusting - your network to is. I’d trust most geeks, but there are people who I’d not want to let use my network not because they’d do something malicious, but because they might inadvertantly be causing me problems (This said, I leave my wireless open, so hey ho…)
A big concern is Bittorrent and other file sharing software (including those that might automatically start up when you turn on your computer.) Certainly, a guest should shut off anything that does anything illegal and/or cripples the upload bandwidth. Not only could you put your host in a sticky legal position using all the upload bandwidth will prevent ACKs getting back and mean that web-browsing will be slow.
Speaking of consuming all the bandwidth, it’s probably best for a guest to get some idea of what else the bandwidth’s being used for before consuming it all. If your host is trying to do something interactive (use SSH on a remote server, for example) even using all the bandwidth for thirty seconds is going to be annoying. There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to get something urgent and tricky done than over a laggy connection, and causing one is a sure way to piss off your host. Also, be aware that if your host is a geek that they might be *serving* stuff from their DSL. They might have other users logged in remotely, thus consuming all the bandwidth (especially all the upload bandwidth) will be terrible.
One of the issues that I’m unsure about is the use of SMTP servers. Is it acceptable to ask to ‘borrow’ the host’s ISP’s server? Is it rude of the host to expect the guest to use one of the free webmail clients, or should the host be making it easy for the guest to use their normal email client (ignoring the fact that we should all have authenticating SMTP over SSL anyway?)
I see you’ve only covered people using their own computers…I guess there’s a whole bunch of etiquette concerning borrowing a machine that’s another post in itself.
A final point, not necessarily related to geeks, but related to all houseguests. Forget leaving a bottle of cologne on the dressing table, leave a bottle of analgesic unobtrusively but in plain sight out in the bathroom for the morning-after-the-night-before. If you’ve just woken up late for work and stumbled out the house with the hangover from hell, your houseguest is probably going to feel the same way when they wake up in a couple of hours.
LapTop006, I beg to differ. Would you begrudge your guest a can of Coke, or the ability to do a load of laundry, or ask them to pay for the breakfast cereal they consume? If you can’t afford to incur small expenses for your guest, then you shouldn’t be offering your home for your guest to visit. It is far more gracious to say “I’m sorry, I’m not really set up to have people staying here — would you like me to recommend a hotel?” than to be miserly in your hospitality. A few bucks here or there shouldn’t be an issue for houseguests.
Another aspect: the host provides tech support. I had a friend stay with me when she suddenly had to move out and needed a place to land temporarily while she got it together. She and I are both self-employed work-from-home tech types (not hardcore geeks, but in geek-related fields). The invitation to use the network, etc., was accompanied by inevitable matters of tech support. The can of coke/laundry/breakfast cereal thing mentioned by Skud needs to be expanded to include one’s time.
“Why won’t my document print from your printer? I selected it…”
“Let’s see.” [some time and digging around and a little while later...] “Oh, you’re connected to my neighbor’s wireless network (ah, the Townhome Villages of the world!).” That’s one example, but whenever there were bandwidth problems, DSL modem needing to be powered off n on, etc., it was a time hit on my end. (All in all, evrything worked out okay in a gracious fashion, but that was one unintended consequence.)