Passwords

Google was being mean to me this morning – it wouldn’t let me access my blog account unless I entered my user name and password. I could come up with the user name, but none of the various versions of my universal password seemed to work. Google said they had sent an email to my gmail address with instructions – only I couldn’t access that because it was demanding the password and I couldn’t remember the freakin’ password! Finally, I managed to click on the right thing, entered the first few letters of my user name and the whole name and password came up. Of course, the password was just represented by black dots, but I counted them and figured out which version of the universal matched and all was well with Google once again.

A little while later, I decided to check on our account at a local bank. When I tried to access it online, the whole stupid password issue reared its ugly head again. This time the claim was that my password had expired and I had to enter a new password that would be “hard to guess”. Yeah, right. Hard for who? The person probably trying to guess it would be me, and I sure don’t need things to be any harder. The evil beings ruling the web site didn’t like any of my versions of the universal password – too close to the original. So I had to come up with something entirely new. This website doesn’t “remember” user names or passwords; they have to be entered each and every time. That is probably the only reason why I have a chance of retaining the password in my mind. And, I had to change the user name a few weeks ago as the website decided it resembled something or other and needed to be changed. So 4 ½ years of retained memory flushed.

I have all sorts of bits and pieces of paper with scribblings on them, listing user names, passwords, etc. for various websites in one of my drawers. The problem is that different entities have different requirements as to type and number of characters and numerals. So a multitude of such things come into being; and not only do I have to remember what they are, but what they apply to. And at my age, that’s not easy. Hence, the piles. I have been intending to make up some sort of master list of user names and passwords. I think it is past time that I do just that.