Now that I have that new cell phone I have entered
that most cursed state of modern consciousness… password hell. Yes, all of my
old phone data was magically rescued from The
Cloud and safely deposited onto my new shiny phone, saving me the
heartbreak of losing all of my pictures and other valuable stuff. The only
problem is that now every time I want to actually use an app, I must reenter my
username and password. The usernames were all saved, but all of the passwords
were not.
Ok, here’s the thing. I haven’t been called upon to
enter these passwords in nearly three years. My chances of remembering them all
are roughly equivalent to the chances that any national democrat will admit to
ever having heard of Jonathan Gruber.
I have two choices. First I could consult my dog-eared
page of usernames and passwords that I keep deep in the bowels of my briefcase.
Its reliability isn’t absolute since it is so old that the ink has begun to
fade and several coffee stains have rendered it unreadable in places. My second
choice is the painstaking process of trying to answer the safety questions that I apparently set up years ago to test my
knowledge of my own past. For example:
What was your first girlfriend’s middle name?
What was your Grandmother’s favorite pudding?
If you were one of the Beatles, which Beatle would you
be?
Wait…what??
So, having failed my own tests, I must then plead
ignorance and beg the various companies to e-mail me a new password, or at
least allow me to start the entire identification process all over again,
always great fun.
Now before any of you technogeeks out there(and you
know who you are) start sending me messages about some new gadget that I can
get that will store all of my usernames and passwords in the Fort Knox neighborhood
of The Cloud…save yourself the
trouble. The last thing I need in my life is another gadget, because that would
require me to come up with yet another username and password. My powers of
creativity are tapped out in that area. Since I’m constantly warned not to use
things like street names, pet names, middle names, birth dates, anniversary dates,
in other words anything that I might actually be able to recall under pressure, I must conjure up weird things like…PuKeVTHokiessuckooii%43320{…to
which I get the reply…Sorry, your password
is insufficiently complex and must contain at least three punctuation marks and
two mathematical formulas. Please try again.
