Nowadays, it seems that people could hardly imagine their life without internet connection. It’s on our phones, in our homes, even restaurants and cafés often provide a Wi-Fi connection.

Redditor u/teezej told the ‘Petty Revenge’ community that she was once the master of Wi-Fi at a café she managed. She discussed the time it broke down, and she was looking into the problem when a customer approached her with demands and accusations. She was sure the loss of connection was purposefully directed at her personally, which it wasn’t. Until it was.

Bored Panda has reached out to the OP and she was kind enough to answer a few of our questions. Scroll down for our interview with her.

Nowadays, it’s difficult to imagine our life without internet connection

Image credits: DragonImages (not the actual photo)

This manager had to deal with an aggravating customer who threw a fit over a broken Wi-Fi connection

Image credits: friends_stock (not the actual photo)

Image credits: teezej

The OP said that some people are only there for the Wi-Fi, which is fine as long as they don’t cause any problems

The OP told Bored Panda that the most frustrating thing about the entire situation was the rude customer demanding to watch her fix the problem. “She leaned over the counter to yell at me while I was on the phone with tech support fiddling with the router. It’s like she wanted me to lose my cool so she could play victim. Recording me on her phone didn’t help.

“Her sense of entitlement and how she treated myself and my employees like dirt ruined things for her,” the redditor added. “I decided if she wanted to play cosmic victim I would go along with it. I would have even let it slide if she was a customer. She wasn’t and had no intention of becoming one.”

The café manager believes that roughly 5% of people come in to use the wifi and don’t buy anything. “It’s not that much of an issue for us, but it can get frustrating when it’s busy,” she said. “On the flip side though, I have had customers who come and use the wifi without purchasing anything for a few weeks; then suddenly they become customers. There’s so little places you can be in the world now where you can just ‘be’. So here, as long as you’re not a jerk—you’re welcome and wanted.”

Billions of internet users worldwide couldn’t imagine their life without it

Image credits: Andrea Piacquadio (not the actual photo)

Nowadays, it would be difficult to imagine our life without the internet. It’s so widely used, it affects nearly every aspect of life, whether it’s buying a new washing machine or communicating with friends and family. Even our vocabularies have been altered by internet slang and new terms deriving from it—using google it to suggest checking something online, for instance, has become nearly a standard practice.

A survey of people across 23 countries revealed that the largest number of users who can’t imagine their life without the internet resides in India—82% of its population are unable to wrap their heads around such an idea. It is followed by the UK (78%), China (77%), and Germany together with the US (both with 73% of the population believing they couldn’t do without the internet).

Nowadays, there are roughly 5.18 billion internet users worldwide, adding up to nearly 65% of the global population. With numbers this huge, it’s difficult to imagine that the internet was invented just four decades ago (with the official birthday being January 1st, 1983). It has developed in leaps and bounds over the years, providing users now with a much different experience than what it was back in the day. Unsurprisingly, younger generations seem to be more dependent on it, especially considering that some of them never knew life without it.

Millennials, who are considered to be the first generation of digital natives, would likely find it difficult to survive without the internet, as nearly 100% of them say they use it, according to the Pew Research Center. The older generations seem to be less dependent on it, with reportedly 91% of generation X, 85% of Baby Boomers, and 62% of the Silent generation used to being online. According to Statista, now in 2023, nearly 92% of the population in the US are internet users, compared to roughly 60% just two decades ago.

Nearly half of people in the US say they regularly use public Wi-Fi hotspots

Image credits: Andrea Piacquadio (not the actual photo)

With so many internet users out there, it is not surprising that they tend to seek places that provide a Wi-Fi connection. Whether it’s a cafe, a library, or even a bus equipped with wireless networking technology, people seem to enjoy the opportunity of saving their mobile data. Statista revealed that the number of public Wi-Fi hotspots worldwide has been steadily increasing since 2016, reaching 549 million in 2022.

Nowadays, nearly half of Americans (47%) say they use public Wi-Fi regularly, according to a 2022 survey carried out by HighSpeedInternet.com. The majority of them use it in restaurants, cafes, and fast food joints. (These popular locations are followed by libraries, stores, and schools respectively.) Out of the surveyed people, 76% say that they are more likely to support a business that provides a public Wi-Fi connection.

The most common reason for people using public Wi-Fi is seeking to cut down on cellular data usage while they’re away from home. The least popular—however worth mentioning as well—is public connection being better than the one people have at home. Most internet users are familiar with the struggle of a web page failing to load or having to wait three minutes for a 10-second snippet to be shown on the screen.

Research shows that loss of connectivity and slower speeds, as well as similar technical failures, can lead to increased irritability and aggression among regular internet users; and that could explain the fit of anger the customer in the OP’s café threw when the Wi-Fi broke down.

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