I’m sick of passwords.
More specifically, I’m sick of having to change them every three months.
I’ve got passwords for the ATM, for online banking, for my voice mail and a gazillion other things at work and home.
The experts say that you should never write them down. That’s to protect you, they say, from bad guys gaining access to your private stuff.
I say it’s to protect them from any liability they would have from you when their systems get hacked, and your information stolen.
Problem is, there are so many cotton-pickin’ passwords that you have to remember, and in variations that require digits, upper-case and lower-case letters and x number of characters, that you can’t use just one password for all the things that you need a password for.
This particular exercise in futility is supposedly meant to make things more efficient and productive by doing everything on the computer.
But on this particular morning, there is nothing efficient nor productive about this. My ability to get the work done that I should be doing isn’t happening because I’ve got so many passwords to manage I’ve been locked out of a Web site.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to make a phone call to get a new password.
2 Comments
Well said. My passwords have hurt me more than protect me.
I echo Jerry’s sentiments.
And while I’m at it, another beef directed at our corporate sources:
If I need to talk to you, I need to talk to you today. I need a telephone number. I don’t need a gigantic e-mail form you may or may not see soon.
It makes me feel old, growing up in an era when you could pick up the phone and call anyone – then fast-forwarding to today where companies do EVERYTHING in their powers to avoid you, from pre-recorded “press one for” threads to these idiotic e-mail forms that are designed specifically to avoid people.