Sid and Sarah

Back in middle school, I had this friend named Sid. He was this short, thin, wiry little Indian kid who was so high strung that he managed to turn ADHD into an adjective. He wasn’t the shiniest piece of glitter in the bottle, so to speak, but his heart was in the right place and he was always up for an adventure. Me and Colin, who was my best friend at the time, had many an excellent sleepover at Sid’s house.

He also loved pranks.

Of course, that doesn’t mean he was very good at them. My favorite Sid prank was the time he IMed me pretending to be a girl from a small Eskimo village in Alaska. I played along, and fed right into his game right on up to the point where he started asking me to tell “her” about some of my friends from school. I decided to tell “her” all about Sid, and how she had better stay away from him if she didn’t want to be stalked by the creepiest kid I knew. At that point he just started yelling at me, asking him how I knew it was him. I actually still have part of the chatlog. with me listing all of the things he did wrong:

fennhacker: 1. eagles don’t live in Northern Alaska
fennhacker: 2. The northern lights are never seen every day
fennhacker: 3. they don’t have much snow right now
reallyhotgurl297: FUCK YOU
reallyhotgurl297: EAGLES DO LIVE THERE
fennhacker: 4. The inuits don’t live in Alaska, they live in northern canada
reallyhotgurl297: AND THE NORTHERN LIGHTS ARE THERE ALL DAY
reallyhotgurl297: AND ALASKA
fennhacker: HELL NO!
reallyhotgurl297: HAHAHAHAHA
reallyhotgurl297: THIS IS SOO FUNNY
reallyhotgurl297: SEEING WHAT I DID WRONG
fennhacker: HAHAHAHA yourself
reallyhotgurl297: THIS IS WICKED FUNNY
reallyhotgurl297: SEEING WHAT I DID WRONG
fennhacker: 5. Girls HATE the sex pistols
reallyhotgurl297: NOT ALWAYS
fennhacker: 6. All of them
fennhacker: 7. EVERYONE has heard of Boston
reallyhotgurl297: NO!
reallyhotgurl297: NOT TRUE

It goes on from there.

Anyway, after this I deemed Sid worthy of being the brunt of some of my own pranks. One day in math class, Sid got back a test with a grade that infuriated him – a D+. He was so angry about this that he tore up the test in front of everyone, shredding it and throwing the pieces into the air before stomping out of the classroom. Since class was ending anyway, I don’t think he got into that much trouble for it, but he was infurated when he found out the next day that I had quietly picked up the scrap of paper containing the actual grade and posted it on the internet.

The best prank I ever played, though, happened just before the end of seventh grade. Sid had been bragging about getting top secret emails from someone-or-other high up in the government. We all knew he was lying, of course, but we had no way of proving it.

Until I realized that the security surrounding his Yahoo mail account was really, really lax.

His username was really easy to figure out – it was the same as his instant messenger handle. His password proved elusive, but I hit paydirt when I got to the “change password” section. This was because the secret question, the fact I would have to know about him in order to reach his deepest, darkest communiques, was his zip code.

Yeah. I knew the zip code for the town he lived in.

The next day, Sid was unable to log into his email account and completely blew his top. He didn’t know what had happened. After a few days, he started getting emails in his new Yahoo account from his old one, telling him to stop lying about recieving top secret government files. A few days after that, I gave him his new password and stopped the madness.

I think Sid learned a valuable lesson about online security, and I learned a valuable lesson about taking pranks too far once Sid ran screaming to a teacher and got me in trouble for what I had done. (Luckily for me, this was before the current era of viruses and rampant hacking and phishing schemes I bet kids nowadays get into all sorts of trouble for this). A good time was had by all, and Sid and I remained friends until middle school ended and then we never spoke again.

I hadn’t thought about this for years, but it crossed my mind today because of this news story.

Yep, some crazy 4chan user knew Sarah Palin’s zip code and did to her what I did to Sid ten years ago. It’s too bad a vice presidential candidate isn’t more computer literate than a seventh grader in 1998.