One of my favorite singers is the late, great Joe South. This Georgia boy could sing and play the guitar like nobody, and though his heyday happened when I was in diapers I still love his tunes to this day. If you’re curious, start with “Games People Play”, then “Don’t It Make You Want to Go Home”. You’ll see what I’m saying… but back to the point of this blog: Joe South had a big hit in 1969 called “Walk a Mile in My Shoes”. It was covered by Elvis and dozens of others, and was arguably meant to address the social unrest of the times.

But I think Joe had something else on his mind. He admittedly was fond of certain drugs (hence the song “Coming Down All Alone), and I think that during one of his trips to places unknown he had A VISION.

I believe Joe saw into the future, saw that Wi-Fi professionals could be arrogant and assume the worst in each others’ installations, and it saddened him. THAT’S where the inspiration for “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” came from, says I. Don’t be so quick to walk into a building, find an AP mounted where YOU would never put it, and assume whoever did mount it there is an idiot guilty of… BAD-Fi.

If I could be you
And you could be me
For just one hour
If we could find a way
To get inside
Each other’s mind, mmm
If you could see you
Through your eyes
Instead of your ego
I believe you’d be
Surprised to see
That you’d been blind, mmm

See, Joe starts by saying “get off my case… I basically had no choice in this auditorium but to do it this way. I presented the best design, then got overruled by architects and interior design people. I wanted to use directional antennas and to not have APs be mounted flush to the wall. It is what it is, and it still works so get over your judgmental self.”

Walk a mile in my shoes
Walk a mile in my shoes
Hey, before you abuse, criticize and accuse
Walk a mile in my shoes

This is where Joe says “yes, there is an AP closer to a big metal pipe than any of us would like. And guess what? THERE WAS NO OTHER PLACE TO PUT IT.”

Now your whole world
You see around you
Is just a reflection
And the law of karma
Says you’re gonna reap
Just what you sow, yes you will

Joe cautions us here- “sooner or later you too are going to have to put one more SSID than you’d like in the air, or to re-enable some crappy data rate and thus open your fool self up to the very stuff you ridicule others for”.

Ah preach on, Joe.

So unless
You’ve lived a life of
Total perfection
You’d better be careful
Of every stone
That you should throw, yeah

Yeah, brother. The Wi-Fi implementation world many of us live in is complex, imperfect, and doesn’t always map to the best practices that we’d like to be able to judiciously follow. If you’ve had the good fortune to never have to deviate from perfection, then you live a charmed life indeed.

Sing us out, Joe…

Walk a mile in my shoes
Walk a mile in my shoes
Hey, before you abuse, criticize and accuse
Walk a mile in my shoes

Hear “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” by Joe South.