The long walk for Wi-Fi

We've landed in Zurich in time to see the sun rise over the Alps. Obviously, the first move for  forty 20-somethings is to pull out our phones and try to find Wi-Fi. The Zurich airport promises 60 minutes of free WiFi once you register. Click register, enter your phone number, and we'll text you the code you can use to login.
Great! I'll appreciate that code when the text message arrives once I'm back stateside. Then I'll be sure to use it next time I'm in the Zurich airport.
But then along comes a member of our group who claims she had found the fountain of Wi-Fi. She has the connectivity to prove it. Facebook, the Twitters, even trivia crack. All working, all updated. She even had the score of the national championship game, proving this was no hoax.
Where did she find this Wi-Fi, and how did she come by it?
"Over that way," she gestures down the terminal. "There is a machine.  A machine with CODES."
"Free WiFi codes?"
"Yes, those codes."
Some of us who heard the tale first begin wandering down in the direction of her gesture. We see machines, but none of them look like they're capable of dispensing codes of any sort, and their are no Swiss around for us to ask. We keep going. There are probably at least a half dozen notifications just floating around the internet, desperately looking for their home in our status bars.
Finally, one of our scouting party sees something that looks internet-related. We make haste in the direction of the sighting.
Upon closer inspection, it seems that this indeed is the fabled Wi-Fi-giving machine of legend.
But how to make it work. The one who first spoke of the Wi-Fi machine told us of the need to scan our boarding pass as an offering before being granted the modern-life-giving Wi-Fi. There's a laser scanner of the type used at the gate, but it makes no flash, no affirming color change, when the first of our party attempts to scan her ticket. Angles, heights, steady, sliding, swiping. No permutations of scanning motions yield any different results for her. Growing impatient, as the unread reddit posts continue to accumulate, Stephen reaches over and attempts an offering of his boarding pass.
The light flashes green. The printer spits out a code. He tries another ticket, belonging to a female member of the group for whom he had chivalrously offered to make the journey. Another green flash, another code. I try mine, another code is granted.
Confirmation that the machine does work inspires our fellow traveler to even more desperate hovering, swiping, sliding motions. I suggest that Stephen attempt to make an offering of her pass. Perhaps his touch is favored by the machine. His attempts are no more successful. She resumes rotating, bending, pressing her ticket against the glass.
Stephen and I slowly back away from the machine, unable to aid our companion in her plight.
"We must leave this one here. There's nothing more we can do for her. Someone needs to tell the others of what we have found..."