Howard Schultz
c/o Starbucks Corporation
2401 Utah Ave S
Seattle, WA 98134

Dear Howard:

I’m writing to you with a problem.  I’m a huge fan of Starbucks and an even bigger fan of the “third place” community experience. I’m a regular customer at your Magnolia Relocation store.  I have spent – no joke here – thousands of dollars at that store in the ten years I’ve lived in Magnolia.

The problem is that I freeze my ass off every time I spend any time there.  It is, quite literally, as cold as sin, and I’ve been both a member of a fraternity and have worked at Microsoft, so I have some passing familiarity with the low temperatures traditionally associated therewith.  I would bet you one frozen buttock that it doesn’t reach more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit in that little back room where I like to work on my laptop, even when the temperatures outside are hot enough you could brew espresso directly in a shot glass.

No one likes to shiver, Howard, but yet I find myself shivering when all I’m trying to do is write code, or blog, or catch up with friends on Facebook, or any of the other million diversions one can do with a laptop and an AT&T Wi-Fi account.  My fingers get all discombobulated, and I find myself randomly hitting q’s and p’s and the little tilde thing way up in the top left, all due to the shivering.  My writing has suffered. The value of my “personal brand”, about which I have recently begun to obsess, is precipitously declining, all due to shiver-induced writing failures.

My bones complain.  No, not my bones, but rather the marrow inside my bones.  The marrow in my very bones freezes, like when one encounters a witch, or a vampire, or one mistakenly hits “Reply All” to an e-mail in which is included a crude joke about one’s boss at work.

I know several Magnolia residents of Icelandic descent and they refuse to go into the Magnolia Relocation store.  Remember, Icelanders are people who like to jump into glacial fjords for their health, yet they studiously avoid this store.  That, to me, seems an important indicator.

It’s so cold, I recently saw an elderly lady expire – I swear to god, that hot-breath-meets-cold-air misty phenomenon all of a sudden just stopped, and it was only when her son-in-law shook her that I suppose her heart restarted.  Her breath resumed making little icy clouds, and I heard her mutter “get me out of here, it’s too damned cold”.  She scuttled off, presumably to board a flight to Miami Beach, or Arizona, or some other place where they experience sensible temperatures.

There is good news.  There are very few bugs.  I suspect that have retreated across the street to Tully’s, where the temperatures are normal.  Also, the famously delicious icy consistency of your Frappuccino-brand beverages is probably prolonged and enhanced by the freezing temperatures.

Howard, I beg of you: ask the manager to turn the dial, and turn up the temperature, or turn down the A/C, or both.  I miss you and want to come back.

So about two weeks ago my Wi-Fi access at Starbucks stopped working. I have an AT&T 3G card with a fully-paid-up data plan, so I thought that was strange. Using Communication Manager, I just started getting the message “Login Failed” or (depending on which screen I was viewing) “Authentication Failed”.

So I call AT&T. I know, that’s my first mistake – it’s like the part in the horror movie where the hero hears a creepy noise and goes out in the dark to explore. You know his head is going to end up in a bucket.

AT&T first transfers me to /dev/null/, wasting about 10 minutes of my life.

I call back. Mistake #2. Now I’m the heroine, grabbing a candle to look for her freshly dismembered boyfriend.

The person I talk to is nice enough, but obviously has no clue about how the Wi-Fi plans work, and I hear her grumbling through the docs for a few minutes. She eventually transfers me to tech support. A nice woman at tech support tells me “Every Starbucks has their own Wi-Fi username and password; just go up to the counter and ask for it.” Sounds odd, since I have an AT&T data plan, but hey, I’ve been on the phone for 30 minutes already and my iPhone is getting fogged over.

I go up to the Starbucks counter. They point me to the “Register Your Starbucks Card” option at Starbucks.com, which is most definitely NOT the Wi-Fi plan I am on.

So – misery all around. Luckily I’m able to connect via the GSM option, and get some work done, but isn’t it laughable that AT&T doesn’t know how to help their own customers? Even if the answer were that they no longer support native Wi-Fi from Starbucks, that would be SOMETHING. But they just have no clue. I’m pretty sure it’s just a password reset issue, but who knows?

Maybe if I’m feeling REALLY masochistic I’ll go to the AT&T store at Pacific Place and slap an employee with a glove and demand justice, or at least an answer.

UPDATE: Thanks to Damon for providing facts, not rumors. Rollout of the AT&T Wi-Fi services should start happening in the springtime.   Here’s an FAQ from Ben Patterson at Yahoo!

Overheard at Starbucks this morning: one of the partners/associates said that there are plans in the works to drop the paid T-Mobile Wi-Fi service in favor of free Wi-Fi. Good news, and a bit overdue. Almost anywhere you go in Seattle right now you can find a cup of coffee and free Wi-Fi.

There’s a Starbuck’s Coffee I go to near my house when I don’t want to make the drive over to Zoka.  Every time I come here I get that Outlook 2007 error “None of the authentication methods supported by this client are supported by your server”, which I described here a couple weeks ago.

Odd that a network /firewall / proxy setting would throw an  authentication error.  It’s not really a problem on my laptop, or the POP/SMTP server, but with the intervening network.

Today is not my day for connectivity.  I’m at a Starbucks down on Eastlake and although T-Mobile reports everything is fine, it seems like half the internet is shut off to me.  My $29.99 T-Mobile account only is useful on those one or two days a month when I actually log in from a Starbucks.

Luckily I can get on WordPress.com and complain!