Hacking

Some days I feel like a super cool super-agent… I sit at my desk with two computers and a monitor and feel like I could be the next Penelope Garcia from Criminal Minds or Angela Monetengro from Bones…. Yeah, I think I'm cool.

Be that what it may, today I finally hacked a pin number… No worries it wasn’t a credit card or bank account. It was the pin to a game from when I was 13.

Christmas of 2000,  I received a “Shrik- green” Gameboy Color with the game: M+M Factory, The Grinch, and a Mary-Kate and Ashley Planner. Since then I have only added SuperMario to my humble collection, never being a big gamer.

A week ago I was cleaning my room and found the Mary-Kate and Ashley Planner and wondering what interesting things might be on there. So I dug out my Gameboy and plugged it in only to be refused at the second screen…. The Secret Pin. I tried all the normal stuff to no avail. They offered a phone number and code that supposedly you could call to reset it, but I wasn’t sure that they would exist… Gameboy colors stopped being in stores in 2008.

However I persevered [after writing down everything I tried] and cracked it today… I was really worried that it would be some crazy number that only 12  year old Marissa knew… After all I had registered the game under the name Marquita Tanotee, my “awesomely cool pseudonym” and that’s not where the secrets stop.

 According to this planner, my biggest crush was Darrin... I have never met or known a Darrin outside of the husband on Bewitched, and I don't think that he is/was cute...past or present.   However, I was able to figure out whom I was referring through the other information provided [birthday, hair color and fake last name that was similar to a real name I knew] 

Most of the other information in the planner was real, except for the bank about who was my best friend… all 12 year old Marissa wrote was: “ M. T.” Oh and apparently I named my mother Carolynn, when her real name is Carol and my father was listed as “daddy”.

The last “stumper” was in the section of speed dials.. not like a Gameboy color can actually dial a phone, but there was a place to put three speed dials. First two I recognized as my grandma’s number and my home. However the last one was totally foreign to me.  The one thing that Present Marissa has that 12 year old Marissa didn’t have was access to Google. So it didn’t take me long to do a “reverse phone look up”.  First hits got me a house address but when I looked at the Google street view I was even more confused because I had never seen that house before… I was about to give up because it really wasn’t that important when I recognized one of the names Google said was associated with that number.

Oh the internet how you scare me sometimes. Anyone else have "super secret sleuthing powers"?