I have this little black book which comes with a nice, black pen that I keep tucked away in a location conveniently within reach. If I reach out for it and it doesn’t slip into my hand, my heart skips several beats. That number is only rivalled by the beats it skips when I can’t find my mobile. This used to be the only exercise my heart would get: skipping whenever I couldn’t locate my vehicle keys (just before leaving for work), house keys ( while fumbling inside my bag at the front door and dancing with impatience for certain reasons that I shall refrain from mentioning here), my spectacles (when I’m all ready to settle down with Netflix) and the Top Two- being unable to find my mobile and my little black book.
Now, of course, thanks to 4 months of lockdown, the keys don’t often change place, the spectacles are usually where I keep them and the mobile hardly ever leaves my side anyway. The problem is the little black book which contains all and I mean ALL my passwords and usernames scribbled across various pages. Because now with online everything becoming a necessity, I need to dig it out more and more.
The little black book has passwords to random shopping sites (some of which have even closed down), rubbing shoulders with account numbers, usernames, login IDs, PINs and MPINs. Some have been scratched out, some have dates next to them, there are arrows going from here to there and scribbled notes in the margins which I will definitely sit down and decipher one day.
But today, it’s about P@$$word$. Yes, those crucially important, secret codes that one must NEVER, EVER tell anyone, especially over the phone. And to make things even more difficult for anyone trying to hack your account and order juices and gourmet foods in your name- these P@$$word$ have to be as complicated as possible.
I started out quite well with combinations of my name, children’s names, pet names, dates of birth, years of birth etc. But these are apparently the easiest for a hacker to figure out. So then I ventured into names of places and foods, foolishly thinking that these would be easy-peasy to remember. Didn’t happen. And finally by the time I entered the world of internet banking on a regular basis, I was already fed up of the Forgot Password? Create New Password routine every time I tried to do something online. (I came up with the brilliant idea of storing all this information in a little black book instead of odd scraps of paper, much later.)
Then with all the sites setting out numerous terms and conditions that a password had to fulfill just to get accepted, things got a little crazy. How many ways are there to write I hate P@$$word$ or P@$$word$ $**K or F**K P@$$word$?! It started getting repetitive. I tried writing ExPLetIVe$ and ending with a # or an @ but that too became tiresome.
Nowadays my passwords are C0r0n@ or c0^iD themed. With some ExPLetIVe$ thrown in for good measure. I also a++ the days of the W<<k and the T!m< of the d@y to make them more indecipherable (certainly for me). I don’t have to remember them, thanks to my little black book, which is a great relief. But now there’s another problem: I’m getting dizzy looking from the book to the keyboard to the book to the keyboard several times to make sure that I have typed the password correctly.
I am sooooo tempted to click on the Remember Me/Save This Password option each time I log in to Internet Banking. But to do so could lead to an episode where my heart would skip so many beats that it may not recover. (like getting my modest earnings scooped out by someone from Nigeria or Jhumri Talaiya) And so, I labour on.
£Øñĝ £î√Ĕ ǷȀȘȘŴŎřĎŞ!!
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