Passwords and User Name Woes

(original title:

RISE OF THE MACHINES–EMAIL WOE EDITION.

Every one of the accounts I have…personal, business, creditors…requires a password.  I have three Yahoo accounts that I use frequently, and each has a separate password.  Today I changed the password on one of the account’s three times.  I didn’t write it down, forgot it, it just plain slipped right out of brain.

It’s not easy to come up with these passwords.  They…you know, “They,” warn of dire consequences for using the same password in ALL accounts…they send little messages with snide remarks such as “Sorry, you have used that password before,”  “you may NOT use certain characters but there must be at least one number, one apostrophe, one hash mark, one capital letter, and an original unique character,” … and my personal favorite:  “that is the most used password on the internet.”

OK, so they usually don’t add “Dummy!” to their warnings….but it is strongly implied.

Yes, I do write down new passwords as I create them.  The issue with me is always WHERE I wrote it.  Sometimes in my password notebook, which is almost indecipherable by now–and thus perfectly safe from any snooping eyes.  But its the passwords scribbled on envelopes, the phone book, calendars, mail, or slips of paper with cryptic notes that may or may not be a password.

While I’m on the subject–I hate creating email addresses and User Names.

Creating a new user name is always a challenge.  One can always use their own name…. say Agnes.   On comes the snarky note: “Agnes is taken.   You can use Agnes389, or Agnes.389 (that’s a DOT,)  or Agnes_389…  (that’s an underscore, but no one who ever learned typing ever heard of an underscore, it’s just a classy name for underline….I hate that, too for what it’s worth.)   That system depends on all the other Agnes’s remembering their own numbers…I have often wondered if numbers used that way are really a viable system, whereby theoretically there is an Agnes_388.  If indeed there is, couldn’t that lead to confusion?

And no matter how obscure my choice for a user name name happens to be–there is always someone with the same name.  Really.

Another thing, once an address is created for an account it appears to remain forever, and requests to have it deleted defy solution.  I had a great email name once, about ten years ago, that I thought was ingeniously clever in its simple beauty.  Somehow, some dastardly evil tekkie, with too much time on their  hands, allowed the account to start sending out spam to all my friends, relatives, acquaintances, and utility bills, and credit cards.    So I called the ISP and although the support person was at least nominally sympathetic, they assured me that my problem was completly unique…had never happened before in the history of the internet.

I get that a lot.   🙂