Locked out!
Over the years, I’ve managed to lock myself out of my house, my truck, my office, my mini-storage unit, and even my locker (I mean, “lock” is right there in the name, right?).
But there’s noting more annoying that getting locked out of some sort of technological device or service that is designed, you know, to make life easier.
It used to be pretty simple. If your computer or your email or whatever had password protection, you could just simply opt not to have one. Dumb? Maybe, but there was a time when “hacking” someone’s email wasn’t really worth the effort. If you did need a password, you could (and many, many people did) just use “password” or “12345” or something equally banal. Of course, this was back when we all thought we were super cool and had email addresses like rockgod420@aol.com or sexysuperstar666@ yahoo.com or whatever. I can’t remember what my very first email address was, but it had “jedi” in it, so I’m actually kind of glad.
Anyway, nowadays, you have to have passwords that are a little more complex, with upper-case letters and at least one number and usually one of those symbols that make it look like you’re censoring profanity. like $#%& or something. I’m a big fan of using @ for some reason, but I stink at remembering passwords, so anytime I have to log in from a new device or there’s no option to “rember this password” I’m stumbling through all the contenders in hopes that it’s this one or this one… wait, didn’t I have to
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change it last time? Let me try it with a capital J… no, that’s not it… sigh.
I guess I could use something that would be easier to remember, like a birthday or anniversary or my cat’s name or something, but I have enough problems without making it easier for someone to steal my identity (although I’ve often joked that if someone did steal my identity, they’d bring it back). And even if you do remember your password, you can still screw things up. Last week, I accidentally had the “caps-lock” key on when I was trying to log on to my online banking and by the time I figured out what was going on, I had guessed wrong too many times and I was locked out of my own bank account… which, big picture, I should be happy about because it means that if someone actually was trying to get into my bank account, it seems like it would be fairly hard (and they would be sorely disappointed if they did). So anyway, I had to go up to the bank, plead stupidity and get them to let me in… again, to my own money. Fun story, they gave me a temporary password and said it would allow me to go in and reset it to whatever I wanted, which I did. Only, I just tried to get into the account again this morning I apparently did not accurately remember what I changed it to. I should have gone with “passoword” again.
