# Ever figure something out but not know how?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-figure-something-out-but-not-know-how/599953>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [October 17, 2011, 8:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-figure-something-out-but-not-know-how/599953 "2011-10-17T20:20:46Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![velvetjones](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/5f9b8f/32.png) [@velvetjones](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/velvetjones)\
**Post date:** [October 17, 2011, 8:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-figure-something-out-but-not-know-how/599953/1 "2011-10-17T20:20:46Z")

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I needed to delete a yahoo account. At the deletion page you have to enter your password and the [captcha](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA) phrase and then click confirm delete.

Every time I tried it, no matter how slowly I typed or how careful I was to type in the captcha phrase and password I got an error that told me that my password was incorrect. I tried multiple times over several weeks to no avail. I always got the incorrect password error.

Then it dawned on me, my password contains a special character, in this case the #. I decided that Yahoo’s account deletion page didn’t like my password with the # and so I changed my password to one with only letters.

Then I went back and deleted my account with no problems. 🙂

So, OK, I was right, the # in the password was the problem. But how the heck would I know that? I can’t for the life of me figure out why I decided to try that.

anything like that ever happen to you, you find the answer to something but have no idea why you thought of it?

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**Author:** ![control-z](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/eada6e/32.png) [@control-z](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/control-z)\
**Post date:** [October 17, 2011, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-figure-something-out-but-not-know-how/599953/2 "2011-10-17T20:24:03Z")

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When I’m trying to solve a problem I can often achieve success by changing two things at once. That way I don’t know precisely what fixed the problem, karma/Murphy/whatever seems to like it that way.