Helvetica 'Foofers' Bold - The Fremont Experience™

07:32 pm - The Fremont Experience™

Well technically this was in Union City, but that and Newark are really just auxiliary polyps to Fremont, so let’s call it a Fremont Experience anyway…

The city has a chronic lack of stuff, you know. Cool places to eat or hang out, like Mission City Coffee Roasting Company in Santa Clara. If you want Starbuck’s or McDonald’s, we’re all about it. If you want unique or useful, afraid you’re out of luck.

One thing I’ve been yearning for is a good free WiFi location with food and stuff. Someplace where I can eat a sandwich, unload the laptop, and get some work done for a couple hours just to have a change of scenery from my usual arrangement at home. Again, Mission Coffee has that sort of thing (they tried charging for wireless access for a bit, but that ended REAL fast). So I was all excited to see “eMocha Cafe” going in just a couple miles from the house.

In one of those change-of-scenery moods today, I set off to see what the new place was like. A couple of banners are hanging off the front of the place, one a “Now Open” sort of thing as I recall, and the other proclaiming “Free Wireless Internet Access.” Free is good. Cool! And I’m hungry, so I’ll get to try out their food offerings as well.

The food portion of the menu isn’t extensive. Sandwiches, pizza, salads. “Ooh, pizza sounds good,” I tell the woman behind the counter…one of about six people working there…and she excitedly tells me that I’d be the first customer ordering a pizza there. But, mulling it over, I’m not keen on all that lardy cheese, and instead opt for a turkey sandwich. One of the guys working there delivers the bad news, that they don’t yet have the bread for the cold sandwiches, but they can make a turkey panini with the same fixins, that it’s “really good.” I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I didn’t really know exactly what a panini is, just some kind of hot sandwich sort of thing, and being up for adventures in food I went along with their panini suggesion. Was given a choice of cheeses, but again considering the lard factor, opted for none. For beverage choices, I asked if they had Diet Coke, but no such luck. “Sold out,” but I think this was another term for “also hasn’t arrived yet.” So it’s a choice of water, Red Bull, various coffee drinks, or a smoothie. Went for a pineapple smoothie (which they actually had the resources to manufacture!), paid for my meal, and went and had a table.

As I’m waiting for my food, I overheard part of a discussion among the employees that the pizzas…yeah, same pizza that I’d been told I could’ve been the first victim, er, customer of…would not be available until next week. Then a group of suits comes in for lunch and a little meeting, and they have to push around a bunch of small tables because, as one of the employees explained to them, “our big tables haven’t come in yet, hopefully next week.” Next week is apparently pretty important. I’m so glad they opened this week instead.

So my food comes, and I learn just what a panini is. It’s a grilled sandwich. You know, on bread. Slathered in butter and grilled. Somehow it just wasn’t an option to get a normal cold turkey sandwich on this bread, no. This must be special magical panini-only bread! I also learn that “no cheese” apparently means “Swiss.” This is more fun than The Elephant Bar! Well at least the smoothie was okay.

Anyway, as I’d voluntarily taken on this food adventure, I ate the grilled lard sandwich anyway, and after washing off my buttery fingers whipped out my laptop to do this free wireless thing…planned to ssh into a work machine and monkey on some code for a couple of hours, that maybe the change of scenery would keep it more interesting.

Laptop finds the wireless network just fine, is assigned an address by the DHCP server, all is good with the “free wireless” part of “free wireless internet access.” What’s missing is the “internet access” part of the equation…it’s seemingly not connected to the outside world yet. I don’t even ask about it, I already know the answer. Next week.

Welcome to Fremont.

Current Mood: annoyed