No Matter How Much I Rack My Brains

Before I get started, a disclaimer for anyone asking why I don't write about Real Issues or The Important Things or The Current State of Affairs: I like keeping my opinions to those things to myself. I don't wanna start an argument, or a "healthy debate," or any kind of controversy--not here, anyway. I've seen people whose blogs were attacked just because they decided to write about something else at a time when Important Things were happening. I say, I do care. I just don't wanna talk about it.

Now, let's move on to today's shallow gripe...


Passwords. Oh, bane of my online existence! These days, everyone has an account for just about everything, and every account needs to be password protected. I--and I'm hardly the most Internet-savvy of folk--already have at least seven (7) different online accounts that have varied usernames and passwords: 2 individual email addresses, one that I share with my radio partner, 1 blog, 1 Twitter account, 1 Facebook account, and an onlilne bank account. I also have my computer's password and the password to the Internet here at home (sometimes it disconnects and I have to type it in to reconnect).

I mean, I get whey they're necessary. I also know that we shouldn't really use the same passwords for different accounts, because that makes it easy for hackers to get into all of them. But my memory... how it fails me when faced with a blinking cursor on that blank space labeled "password"! And it's strange because I never had problems memorizing things in school. It's like passwords are my Kryptonite: my brain rejects them.

I once created an account--and this was way back in high school--for SAT mock testing. I wanted to try and take the SAT's and the site allowed me to find out if I was ready to do so. Of course, the day after I signed up, I forgot what my password was. Protocol is to hit the "Forgot username/password" button, which I did. It sent a link to my email, yadda-yadda-yadda... and then it asked me the security question. Get this: I didn't know the answer. I knew the real answer to the question, but apparently that wasn't the answer I had put in when I was making the account. I assume I wanted to make it difficult to answer. Good job, self! To this day, I don't know what the answer to that security question is. 

I have at least three other similar stories, one of them having to do with me forgetting my password immediately upon activation of a recent online account I opened for my bank records, but maybe I'll tell that another time. 

In the meantime, I'll have to satisfy myself with noting down my passwords in a secret place where no one (I hope) can find them... and checking this secret list whenever I have to access any of my accounts. How sad.