About A Story Point That's Kind Of Hard To Swallow

A lot of absurd and potentially non-credible events mark the second episode of About A Boy. In fact, if these situations occurred in almost any other show you can imagine, you would be calling bullshit from start to finish. And yet the characters we already knew from the source film and saw reconceived in the series premiere can make them all convincing! ...Well, not all. Almost all. With two extremely exceptions -- one borderline and one very glaring.

All of the following story elements are, based on what we know, perfectly cromulent:

• Fiona needs a babysitter for Marcus while she goes on a job interview.
• Fiona needs to ask this favour of someone she barely knows.
• Fiona has moved to a city where she apparently doesn't know any other adults/people.
• Fiona has ethical and moral objections about massaging the truth on her résumé CV.
• Will's automatic response to the babysitting request is to dodge it.
• Will shows up at a pool party in regular street clothes.
• Will has no compunction about bringing Marcus to a pool party hosted by Lil' Jon.
• Will has no concept of what is an appropriate place to bring a child OR Will is so self-involved that he wouldn't care about bringing said child to an adult party so that Will could enjoy the party himself.
• Will thinks it's fine to set a child loose in a party full of strangers as long as they make eye contact with each other at regular intervals.

Marginally believable is the notion that Fiona would take Will's constructive criticism and alter the part of her CV that cites her "nomadic" period, on the theory that he might know better than she the sorts of things that might raise alarm bells for potential employers, even though (a) as far as we know Will has never had a job, and (b) if there's one city in this nation where a nomadic phase would be regarded as a plus on a résumé, it's San Francisco. (If there are two: San Francisco and Portland.)

But the one thing I absolutely cannot accept is practically the first thing that happens in the episode.

Will's network password is "password"?!

No. No, it isn't.

Will is an idle, very wealthy dude. He would be an early adopter of gadgets of all kinds because he has a lot of disposable income and no reason not to treat himself. Will would know how to change his network password, and more importantly, he would have lots of reasons why he should: like, for instance, the parade of tail making its way through his house on a regular basis that he would want to keep from having easy access to all his private business (and he'd damn sure have a password on his phone).

Furthermore, Will lives in San Francisco, the tech capital of the world. Even if he didn't know anything else, he would know the importance of putting up the most elementary safeguards to protect his data from his neighbours, any of whom could totally be a hacker.

Finally, Will lives in San Francisco. He doesn't need to exceed his monthly data cap because Meadowlark across the street is downloading quinoa recipes.

In conclusion, Will would know at least as much about computers as I do, and San Francisco sucks.