hack |hak|

The first definition of the word above, according to the dictionary that is installed on my Mac, has to do with cutting, as in hack off dead branches. The second definition is as follows:

2  use a computer to gain unauthorized access to data in a system: they hacked into a bank's computer.

By my understanding of the English language, our scheduling system for students seeking a writing tutorial was hacked on Thursday. Someone stole a tutor’s password, went into the online scheduler and systematically deleted approximately eighty appointments that had been made for Thursday, Friday and Sunday.

As you can well imagine, this caused a major upheaval, freaking out dozens of students and sending me on a multi-hour quest to undo the damage -- I worked on it til 10 that night. Luckily I was able to rebuild the schedule, one appointment at a time; I won't bore you with the details of how tedious that was.

What I will tell you is that the company we rent the software from – whose name I will not reveal because they are just the kind of people who would call out their lawyers – has been remarkably unhelpful and has engaged in a form of logic that I simply can't understand.

I’m asking for your help. Maybe you can explain to me how their brains work.

They tell me we were neither “attacked,” nor “hacked.” They base this claim on the fact that the perpetrator had a usable password and was able to login on his/her first attempt.

. . . your site was definitely not hacked. One of (our) emails (name redacted by Walter) explains what happened really well, because an individual actually used the correct login for XX and canceled the appointments. That person knew the correct password before logging in, and also did not have to change XX password beforehand.

By this logic I assume that if a thief steals a key to someone’s house and uses it to then remove contents from the house a robbery has not occurred.

Am I missing something? Can you help me, readers?

The other fascinating and irritating issue in this tale is why. Why would someone do this? Was it a Yale student pissed off at the tutor whose password was used? Was it a Yale student pissed off at me, or at Yale, or at the world? Or was it a hacker – oops, sorry, we weren't hacked – was it a bored computer user in Alaska or China or Australia who has nothing to do with Yale?

Who the hell knows? I do know that hackers – oh, damn, there’s that word again – often do what they do just for the fun of it. As is certainly true in this case, there is no financial gain involved, no power garnered, no fame earned. They just do it because they can.

Maybe hacker is in fact not the right word. Maybe asshole is.

What a world we live in.