I should have recognized it as the beginning of the
end. When my university employer decided to make the transition from paper to
computers some years back, each employee was emailed unchangeable personal
passwords to do business with various departments, with the all-caps admonition:
COMMIT THESE TO MEMORY! DO NOT WRITE THEM DOWN!
The passwords were all along the lines of *jwqY@7. Well, I didn’t really want to contact the
travel office anyway.
Lo these many years later, I have 12 PAGES of
passwords. The irony, of course, is that I actually have a phenomenal memory
for numbers. I still remember all of my childhood friends’ birthdays,
addresses, and even phone numbers. But that, of course, is because they were
all in my native English and I actually wanted to remember them.
Now, of course, we are all subjected to Torture by
Password. The requirements are getting more onerous by the day. There usually
have to be a minimum of 8 characters and include a capital letter, number, and “special
character.” I can see that for financial accounts, but your local photo
developing place? Please! Go ahead and steal my photos! My kids would thank you
for it!
Personally, I would never willingly choose a
password with a capital letter. I have hurled epithets at a lot of login sites
over this, and I mean really really
bad words. (I KNOW THAT’S MY PASSWORD YOU effing #$^&*#@#s! WHY DOESN’T IT
WORK?????) Ultimately, I have to have them send me a link to re-set my password
to a new one that I won’t remember either.
Let’s talk about those security questions for a
moment. Almost all of our accounts are joint so when the question pops up about
the name of the high school you graduated from, does it mean Olof’s or mine?
His first car or my first car? Whenever there’s a choice (and there usually
isn’t), we try to go for the unequivocal ones like, “Name of the city in which
you got married.” Of course, even that assumes our second marriages, not the
first ones. Neither of us can remember
our maternal grandmothers’ maiden names so we just never buying anything from
that site.
I realize on-line hacking is a serious problem but
when warned to be sure that the “personal phrase” or the “personal security
image” I selected appears before typing my password, I can only think, “Hmm,
does that look like an image I’d choose?” I tried to always go for a bird but
avians aren’t always one of the options. Note to security programmers: There
should always be a bird pick!
But it’s not even enough anymore that you have an
email address, a user name, a password, a personal phrase, a personal security image,
a display name, and three useless security questions. Several of our financial
sites now require a 4-digit pin as well. This crosses the line into cruel.
My husband’s former employer made them change their
payroll passwords every six months but you could never use one you’d used
before. He worked there 17 years.
I’m truly reaching the end of the line on all this.
There’s the Google and social media passwords, never mind your cell phone
password and iTunes password and your Locate My Lost iPhone password, and your
computer login and email accounts. There
are passwords for your virus software and your blog site, the seven airlines, 11
financial institutions, the ATM, the bill paying, six healthcare portals,
retiree benefits, 27 assorted vendors, Staples, the pet meds place, your
1-800-Flowers account, the toy sites for the grandkids, the newspaper and
magazine subscriptions, your Neighborhood Watch, your college alumni link,
PayPal, the guest login on your home WiFi, assorted software renewal logins,
TurboTax, Skype, Amazon, YouTube, your husband’s Droid, never mind Social
Security and Medicare for us oldies. What’s my password? I HAVE NO FRIGGING
IDEA! I DON’T HAVE ENOUGH BRAIN CELLS LEFT!
And on top of all that, my Amazon and Kindle book
sales accounts and my Press Club interactions only work on Mozilla Firefox and
not Internet Explorer. My bank insists on regularly hitting me up for security
questions even though I’ve told them 8 billion times that THIS IS A COMPUTER I
REGULARLY USE. The idea may have been to make it all easier but it seems like
the only people who are finding it so are hackers. Maybe that’s the job of the
future, the personal hacker. You just forget all about that password list and
the security images and have someone on call to hack into your sites as needed.
Since every day someone seems to steal my information from one of the
conglomerates I deal with, I wouldn’t even be putting my data at risk since
everyone but me seems to have access to it anyway.
The swelling in my brain is going down already.
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