Gentlemen. This is entirely part of Linuxs problem. Someone has an issue, that's repeatable and it's always "I've never experienced it".
With more and more people running Linux and more and more computer configurations, these types of things are going to happen. It's not the end of the world, but for someone that doesn't have a second PC to download files to (unlikely, as you need to create a bootable medium at some point), it's a deal breaker that something as simple as network drivers are not included.
Something else must have been wrong, rather than just missing. The drivers for the Intel 210 Wifi cards are older than stone tools. You can't even download a Mint old enough to not contain them in the standard kernel.