Must places in Ecuador we went were like this. Only exception was the hotel in the new city part of Quito. Everywhere else was “paper goes in the bin”

Interesting edge case. Not really relevant though.

Nah you need a minimum of two pairs for an Ethernet connection.

You can pretty reliably pull 1G with cat 5 over household distances (10m or so). More likely it’s the equipment limiting the speed.

I have mine running several virtual tabletops and caddy reverse proxy

Costco doesn’t do a real check either. They just look at your cart and swipe your receipt with a highlighter. The only thing I can imagine they are actually checking is approximate number of items.

That story is The Raft by Stephen King. It was included in the book Skeleton Crew, which was a collection of his short stories. The movie version was in Creepshow 2.