Password Please

The other day I was watching NCAA hoops at a friend's house when it came to our attention that there was a perfect storm of close games happening at once (including Butler giving Tennessee a serious run and Davidson coming back from a significant deficit against Georgetown).

Being that we could only watch one TV at a time, we needed to fire up a laptop and watch online pronto.

The only problem was that the first laptop we had was a Mac, and was none too interested in opening the video player.

Our backup was a dusty old Toshiba with the battery pack ripped out. We decided to give it a shot, but were immediately stonewalled by the machine asking us for a password to log onto Windows. Unfortunately, the owner of this antique was out of town. This was an issue. In what appeared to be a good omen, I found a button that I could click on to give us the password hint.

It said the hint was "Payne Stewart."

Our spirits boosted, we began to try the obvious: golf, masters, socks, hat (Payne was of course known for his quirky socks and hat). None of these worked. Getting a little bit more desperate, we then tried "augusta." No dice.

Now we were starting to get a bit frantic. The games were winding down to the final minutes and we really needed to see Butler-Tennessee (all we had on the air was Davidson-Georgetown).

In that moment of desperation, I took a flier:

"cancer," I typed into the field.

And it didn't work. Making matters worse, I was now clearly going to hell. With the ice broken, I started firing out more inappropriate password options, but neither "death" nor "dead" worked. (I know, I really am a bad person.)

Finally, in this darkest moment, we got through to our friend who owned the laptop.

Turns out the password, for whatever reason, was "New York."

The hint apparently should have been: "Place where The OCC officially booked his ticket to Hades."

As one final gut shot, the cursed Toshiba was too old and out of date to load up the video player. So I smashed it with a battle ax, stormed out of the apartment and wandered out to the street in search of innocent people to terrorize.

March Madness had clearly set in.