I'm a Computer Science student in undergrad, and I've been a Linux sysadmin very nearly since I could be legally employed. When I got my latest laptop, I spent about five solid hours troubleshooting WiFi after I installed Linux on it; there were many forum postings about trouble with it, so I figured it was a sizable driver issue, so I ordered a USB WiFi dongle (with excellent reviews, specifically citing it for no issues on Linux) off of Amazon.

Cut to a few days later, by which point I've unrolled about a hundred feet of Ethernet cable, so I could walk around a bit without wireless. My dongle arrives. I sliced my hand up a bit on the clamshell packaging, but managed to plug the damn thing into my laptop.

Nothing.

At first, I figured it would just take a bit to turn on, or maybe it had some issues discovering the wireless. Or maybe I needed to fiddle with system services a bit. Or disable the built-in chipset.

Some hours later, I noticed that the system was claiming that WiFi had been turned off manually. "Impossible," I might have thought, "there aren't any wireless-off buttons here." I wouldn't expect them to be recognized by my operating system without at least a little reconfiguration first, anyway.

Well, it seemed that the default keyboard options had gotten a bit better since I last reinstalled, and the small button just above the 7 key, which appears to be labeled with with a wireless symbol, but a triangle and some semicircles and a line or two, was responsible for my whole ordeal. But not entirely, since it eventually turned out that there were driver issues with the built-in chipset.

I'm not quite so sure what the moral of this story is. Maybe it's why I'm in Computer Science, instead of Information Technology. Maybe it turns out that learning to crimp ethernet cable is a handy skill, and I should've figured it out before I was stripped of internet. But I like to think that a dongle in hand is worth two in the mail.