When I was growing up the word “Password” was something boys used to keep girls out of tree houses and it was always secret “What’s the secret password” they would ask. Of course, we never knew. Somehow girls that I knew were never into passwords.
Then somewhere after WWII a game called “Passwords” was invented and was not only a board game, but was on television and was hosted by Allen Lud something, Betty White’s husband. It was a word game and I watched it regularly since I am really into word games. I loved all of them, Scrabble ®, Upwards ®, crosswords, cryptograms, anything to do with words.
But today, passwords are everywhere on the internet. You can’t do anything without a password. I started out with one password and used it for everything. It was simple, a six letter word, and more importantly, I could remember it. Well, then some idiot decided that passwords should also have a number and letters associated with it. Okay, a little more complicated, but hey, I had a birthday number and I could use that or some part of it anyway. And, the really neat part was that I could use anyone’s birthday or even a made up birthday like 996654.
Well, that didn’t last very long since I couldn’t remember a made up birthday. Now they rate your password easy, medium, difficult, really difficult, hard to crack, impossible to crack. And, the more complicated the better. Suggestions ranged from using @ for “A” or $ for “S” or 0 for “O” and any number of other weird symbols like > or * or ~. This is all well and good, but again, how am I suppose to remember all of this gibberish.
Finally, I decided to use the name of the company or site I was visiting like Google or Facebook or Garmin or Amazon with some combination of numbers. At first I did that with only two numbers. That wasn’t difficult enough. So, I added two more numbers and had four numbers. Then I decided to make the first letter a capital letter. Well, the result is that now I have two pages of passwords written down that I have to keep glued to my right arm so I can refer to it every time I access any internet site. I am near ready to go back to my simple first password and say the hell with it, let them hack into my account. I don’t have any money for them to steal and my Facebook profile reveals most of my personal life. Who cares about an old crone’s life anyway?
Now they’ve also come up with a “User ID” to go along with your “Password.” Oh, God, please spare me. This may just drive me back to pen and paper and paper encyclopedias and dictionaries. I may even resurrect my old manual typewriter and never ever mention the word “Cyber” anything again! But then, I really do like to blog…..