Your Password is Incorrect
It’s official. I’ve run out of passwords. I’ve used birthdays and anniversaries and graduations and life events and important dates for every child, grandchild, sibling, aunt, uncle, parent and grandparent I’ve ever had, whether I liked them or not. The problem is not that I can’t remember the passwords themselves, I just can’t remember which one I used for which site, and it frustrates me beyond the point of no return, and if I ever meet someone that suggests just use the same one for every site one more time and I call you and ask you to come over as quickly as possible, don’t question me about it, just bring a shovel and wear old clothes. You will immediately understand the issue.
Password at one time was a TV game show. It was a pretty popular show and ran from 1961 - 1967 and again from 1971 - 1975. Alan Ludden was the original host, and the show is listed as the #8 most popular game show in TV history. There were later versions like Password Plus and Super Password and Million Dollar Password that nobody paid much attention to, but each had its own little variation of the original game with prizes for winners and lovely parting gifts for the unsuccessful contestants. There were teams of 2, and each team had a “celebrity” and a normal person. The point was for one member of the team to give one-word clues to a secret word (password) for the other person to guess. It wasn’t necessarily fascinating but did put the respective vocabularies of each contestant on display, and if you think a synonym is the kind of roll English teachers have for breakfast it would probably have been best for you to have remained at home and watched.
Military groups use passwords so scouts in forward areas can return to their own lines without being shot by the sentries and guards from their own side. In WWII, soldiers were taught to ask questions that only those on their side would know, like who won the 1940 World Series or to pronounce words that might give away an accent. There’s an interesting story about English speaking German commandos dressed as US soldiers and driving captured American vehicles during the Battle of the Bulge in WWII getting caught because they didn’t know the correct password at a highway junction behind US lines. Not knowing the correct passwords for that day turned out poorly for them and discouraged others from playing that particular game again.
Passwords now have a different meaning, and exotic, invasively ubiquitous technology has forced upon us the necessity of unique and individual passwords that allow access to our work, relaxation, professional, financial, entertainment, communicative and shopping programs. These magic words have become the bane of modern life for many of us. Each system, operation, function, subscription, interest, business and otherwise important website has its own password, and if you can’t figure out a way to keep them straight and remember which word goes to which site or activity you will often find yourself in what amounts to password jail. Google has, in many cases, a handy dandy little password remembering tool that can help but is certainly not fool proof; the key word there evidently, at least in my case, being “fool”. My first thoughts were to use the same password for everything, but that never works because different sites have different requirements for a password to function. One, for example, might require a number, the next a capital letter and a number, the next a number, a capital letter and a choice from the other keyboard like an ampersand or an exclamation point or a partridge in a pear tree…you get the idea. Experts say that using the same password for more than one app or site or function is dangerous, in that some hacker might steal one of your secret words and empty your bank account or charge you for endless Netflix movies or order thousands of dollars’ worth of stuff from some bogus Chinese company that will eventually sell your information to a car warranty scam in India. I personally know of grandkids that have charged hundreds of dollars’ worth of “extras” on game accounts to their parents’ credit card. I had no idea until then that the weapons market for Fortnight was quite the industry that it is, and that there’s apparently no age restrictions for machine guns or grenades or thermonuclear devices in the game world, and the actual costs for play guns are commensurate with those in real life. The moral of that story is that if you have credit card information on your computer your kids or grandkids can find it quicker than almost any secret hacker and will not hesitate to use it if you are not watching, and your computer will auto-fill your credit card information for them if they are using your device. How convenient.
Sometimes scammers will call or email or IM people trying to get passwords or personal information about credit cards or bank accounts or social security numbers or other important stuff. I have read extensively about how to spot these scams and heard the social security office ad about “we will never threaten you over the phone.” Interestingly enough, I have never heard of a similar ad from the IRS. I have also learned from ads on my computer and iPhone to be scared of “the dark web” and have no idea what it is or how to get to it, but supposedly that’s a particularly seedy, back-alley part of the internet where criminals congregate and sell social security numbers and passwords. What really scares me is how they taught me to be afraid of something I can’t locate and don’t know anything about.
My doctor has a password protected site, and I guess it’s so nobody besides me can order refills on my blood pressure medication. The issue there is that if she sends me a message, I probably won't get it. I hope whatever the message is, it's not about something immediately life threatening. My insurance company sends me emails about my driving habits and insurance expense notices, but I can’t remember the password to get into their website and see exactly what coverage I’m paying for on my house and cars. From their bills, it seems they think a teenager is driving one of our cars, and not very well at that. Occasionally I will receive the dreaded “the information you entered is not correct” message and have to begin the process of username identification and inventing a new password all over again. It seems to be easier to ask for both at the same time, and the only catch is when the machine tells me “You cannot re-use the same password from 10 minutes ago” and here we go again with the inability to come up with anything I haven't used before several hundred times. Rather than continue this high anxiety process, I often just leave the site and look for whatever it is I wanted somewhere else.
My personal password memory system is, to a larger degree than most, underdeveloped. I hold the frustrating ability - not necessarily unique, I am told - to type in a new password and be unable to remember it exactly within a space of mere seconds and have to repeat the entire process - sometimes 3 or 4 times. I once started a list of passwords to solve these problems, but it was nearing two pages within just a few days and it magically disappeared from my desk soon after. Betsy often asks me the password for Ebay or PayPal or some other site, and my fear and loathing of trying to remember is such that I simply let her use my computer so it can - maybe - fill in the correct word.
One of the absolute worst decisions I ever made - several times, it seems - was to allow a site to choose a password for me. I’m pretty sure my computer has a gremlin in its operational system that intentionally either refuses to remember the correct nonsensical combination of numbers, letters and signs in the appropriate order so I will have to go through the process of password recovery several times until my frustration level builds to the point where evil thoughts and ugly words accidentally come out. I think that inner gremlin in my computer does it on purpose, and lives for the occasional loss of temper and/or control that proves, in his dirty little chip of a mind, that humans are indeed frail and stupid beings.
Another source of frustration, at least where passwords are concerned, is that there are no hints allowed. Sometimes all I would need would be something simple and generic like “the street where you used to live” or “the year your dad was born” but alas, no. I suppose I should be grateful the computer doesn’t know that much about me, or at least is unwilling to let on that it does. Or wait a second. Suppose it does give you a hint, like the title of this story.
So what’s the solution here? Are we doomed to a password purgatory with a metaphysical sign above each computer screen that says “abandon hope all ye password challenged who enter here?” I think not. The solution I use is simply the most human one of all; deal with it.
That’s right. You read it correctly. Deal with it. Rage against the machine, fight the power, sock it to the Man, do not go gently into that good night and do not under any circumstances accept or resign yourself to defeat or acquiesce to a lesser existence, just deal with it. Adapt and overcome, damn the torpedoes and show the machine world you might get down but you won’t get out. Deal with it and force your will on the obstacles at hand. Endeavor to persevere and declare war on the frustrations that have been mechanically forced upon us. Go among the matrix of the ones and zeros where no man has gone before…OK - just got a little carried away there and dove a little too deeply into the existentialist pool.
But really, it’s a binary choice. Just deal with it and realize that if this is among the biggest frustrations in your life - not food, not water, not clothing, not family, not finances - then you are really just looking for stuff to whine about, so deal with it or not. It’s one of the few times in life you really do have a choice this simple. Deal with it or accept defeat and go back to pencil and paper. I have to go now - it’s time to feed my thesaurus.