Curious case with a VPN

As you would expect of someone who writes a Defensive Computing blog, I am a frequent VPN user. I both pay for a full-fledged VPN service and also dabble with

a couple VPNs that offer limited monthly bandwidth for free.

      My main VPN provider offers servers all over the world. Sometimes I connect to a server on the West coast of the U.S., sometimes the East coast, sometimes the South and sometimes Canada. Why Canada? Just because.

      There are occasionally things that don't work well on a VPN, but I often stay connected all day. As such, its easy to forget that the VPN is active -- and I recently got burned by forgetting. Normally, of course, the situation is reversed, trouble comes to those whose VPN is off rather than on.