Have you ever faced a situation where you need to guess a numeric code of somekind?  Perhaps you’re delivery pizza in a gated community, or you need to make a copy at work, but it is protected with a code and you don’t know it?

I enjoy people watching.  It’s fun to see what people do and don’t do.  For instance, have you noticed no one every hides the keyboard when they enter a pin / password?  It just doesn’t happen.  I started a practice at Home Depot of looking when they enter the code to start those protected machines just for kicks.  I was astonished to learn that they are almost always the same (even if different parts of the country).  I bet you can guess it on your first try…  Ready…  That’s right, it’s 1234 (* or #).

I have another friend who always uses #1010 to get into gated communities, he said it almost never fails.  If you add 1234, 1111, 0000, 4321, and a few other codes, I think you could enter 90%+ of the gated communities in the world.

Copy machines with codes…  I once spent time in a work environment where all the copiers had codes, and you had to get your code from a supervisor to make a copy…  This allowed them to keep track of who was making copies for what to control copy expenses.  Well…  A 4 digit code isn’t that difficult to discover.  The same practice as gated communities usually works, and if not, you can enter about one code every two seconds if you are fast.  It is likely the copier has 10+ codes in it, meaning that you only have to try about a thousand before you find it.

Anyways, I’m not writing this to encourage hacking copier codes, entering a community to rob it, or using dangerous equipment without a store associate.  I just find it interesting, and helpful for that awkward situation where a friend gives you the wrong gate code or you forget it.