Invalid password
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010
I think I may have identified another 21st century ‘illness’ – password fatigue.
This became apparent to me last night when, straight after locking myself out of my online banking for failing to remember the 11th digit of my 14 digit password, I then attempted to buy some tickets for the National Theatre and discovered that I needed to set up yet another account with yet another ‘unique’ password. I felt like screaming. Why can’t I just buy the damn tickets?*
I think I have at least 50 accounts which require passwords – from Amazon and our work’s Flickr page to this blog and the Barbican. Of course, they’re not all completely different and they have varying degrees of complexity, but this doesn’t make things any easier. I still have to remember which password it actually is and which complicated recipe of numbers and £$%£^’s I cooked up at the time. And the less I use the account and password in question, the harder it gets. God knows what my password for ebay is, its been that long since I used it, but I know I’ve got one.
Being a paranoid and cynical type of person who believes that identity muggers really do lurk around every corner, of course I never write any of them down. So all the passwords are residing in my head and as Betty Everett once sung ‘it’s getting mighty crowded’.
* ok, I work in marketing and I know exactly why they don’t allow this, but that’s not the point.
