When my son was in the hospital with a broken leg, I discovered they had free wireless. Several months later, our home internet connection went down. I brought my laptop with me on errands thinking I would stop at Panera to download my emails. I was running very late and my wife was mad - I did not have time to go to Panera, but was near the hospital so I pulled behind the loading doc outside the hospital and accessed the wireless network to download my eamils

While on vacation to access the office to fix problems, boated 10 miles to a wireless marina (20 gallons at 1/2 mpg). I didn't want to have to get off my boat.

I was on a crazy roadtrip all over the Mediteranean coastline (Italy, France, Spain) after a conference in Nice and wi-fi was often hard to come by in small towns along the shore.
1. On a religious holiday in Spain when everything in a town was closed we drove around searching for a signal and ended up parking behind the stalls at a slaughterhouse - it appears they did not know how to secure the network. Had to use babelfish to translate while explaining to the police that we were just tourists. They brought us to a bar and bought us dinner (which came with free wi-fi).
2. Sat through the UA playoff between England and Italy feigning desire for Italy to win when we were clearly England fans since it was the only place in town with internet. At least the local wine was very good that night and free flowing.
3. Made dinner for a family we met at a beach in St. Tropez as part of a negotiation including good wine and connectivity (very talented in international affairs, and never discount a culinary degree).

Parked in a recently former employer's parking lot between interviews because I knew they had an unencrypted guest network.

We cant pay our FIOS because we are low on cash, low and behold i put my antenna out the window and i get a signal (very low) with 1.0MBps of an unsecured network. it kept dropping signal so i googled and made an antenna out of an old satellite dish. now im getting 5 more unsecured networks and 17 secure ones!!!!! AND i found a network i get 108MBps (i have an N card) and the actual download speed i tested it at is 7MB/s down and 5 up!!!! Im so happy. the hell with paying for FIOS :)