If you head on over to free agent Nyjer Morgan’s Twitter account, you’ll notice that he’s currently taking suggestions for a new Twitter handle and asking his 85,000+ followers to come join him on his new Twitter account that doesn’t even exist yet. And while I could probably spend the rest of the afternoon suggesting new Twitter handles for him – including @Mr239Average, @MilwaukeesWorst and @WorthlessInOctober, among others – I should probably point out that the reason he needs a new Twitter account is because he was “hacked”.
Of course, by hacked I mean that he had an easy password, entrusted it with his girlfriend and then apparently cheated on her (or at least really pissed her off). That’s why if you’re one of the 85K that he’s begging to Jerry Maguire with him, you may have noticed a little craziness on his Twitter feed last night. You know, because he got “hacked”.
As the USA Today points out, Morgan indeed changed his password to protect against further “hacking”. I hope he thought long and hard, too, before changing it from 12345 to 23456.
But let’s talk about athletes and “hacking” for a second. Remember when hacking used to mean something? Like, if someone told me they hacked a site, I’d immediately think of some Anonymous bro in a dimly-lit bedroom with tin foil on the windows cackling as he adds code to the Westboro Baptist Church’s website to show GIFs off donkeys having sex every time someone visits.
Instead, “hacking” has turned into the scapegoat of every teenage girl who leaves her Facebook logged in at an Apple store or clicks on a link because she thinks that she’s actually the 100 millionth visitor and can collect her free iPad 3. It’s high time that someone invents a microchip that we can implant in every athletes’ brain so that when they Tweet, “Sorry I was hacked” they will receive an electric shock every 5 seconds until they Tweet, “Sorry, I wasn’t hacked, I left my Twitter logged in on my phone because I’m a dum-dum.”
