Growing up as I did on a staple of Enid Blyton books its not surprising that my friends and I are familiar with the word "password".We replicated the secret society like the secret seven of our childhood stories and met in an unused shed at the bottom of our school playground.We changed the password depending on who we wanted to keep in or out.Some girls told their friends about the club but as we didn't always like all the girls we needed to change the password.Of course it was uncomplicated things ,usually the name of our favourite food or teacher and if one of us was feeling superior or intellectual then it got a bit more complicated.School days led us on to college and somewhere along the way we discovered new authors,new books and new pass times and the password and all the accompanying trappings were soon forgotten.
Then technology came into our lives and with it the password made a come back.I thought it would be a flashback on childhood and created my first password with some favourite word and thought this would give me right of passage.How sadly mistaken I was.It started by rejecting my user name (obviously there were too many people with my name or short forms of it).I had to try various combinations of my name and surname or choose something with no relevance to me as a person.Considering that at the best of times I have bad memory this had me confused but I did manage to get a user name that I may have no problem remembering.Thinking that the battle had been won I moved on to the password.Now having grown up with passwords I thought this would be child's play but again I was up against electronic fraud,surveillance,cookies (which is not the biscuit that I thought it was,it had something to do with data) and whatever,this was critical.Not only did I need a password that I could remember but it also had to have numbers and letters mixed up,I needed to have different passwords for different things,so between the bank,the insurance,investments,booking tickets etc etc.it was proving to be a minefield that I was not equipped to handle.Thankfully they do have an option that lets you click on "forgot password" but the downside being that they would send an email to my email id and I would have to check it to get my new password.Didn't anyone think that I may have forgotten my email password also.This didn't end there.Banks expect you to change passwords at regular intervals.Security they say so there I am having to remember loads of numbers and word combinations that have me so confused that I wonder where it will all end.For instance here I was wanting to update a post on this blog but for the life of me I couldn't remember the password,so I was excluded from participating in something that I though was my own creation and had to seek assistance from some unknown human or alien (for all I know there is a machine somewhere that's programmed to deal with people like me).to get into this blog.Now if that isn't pathetic what is.I though myself rather clever by writing down all my passwords in a little book very much like a telephone book but all hell broke loose when I mentioned this to some of my more tech savvy friends.According to them I was leaving myself open to being robbed,stalked or worse so the book had to be destroyed.With increasing age I shudder to think what will happen to me when I find myself penniless thanks to forgetting my bank password or being stranded in some airport or train station because there was no human being around to help me and all the machines needed passwords.I think I will simply retire to some far off place with no access to technology where I can live off produce from the wild and hitch hike if I need to travel.So much for all the excitement of passwords when I was a child.Did we ever think that with all the ease that technology offers,it would also complicate our lives so much?
