********.
“Wrong Password” blinks the screen in glee.
Aaaaaargh!!! There I go. Another password forgotten. One
more try. Same result. The final one – I know this one could be the end of the
road, and take my time, racking my memory, and enter the one I think is it, but
with a sinking heart. “Wrong Password. You are now locked out.” That’s it. I am
now banished, and I need to go through a little bit of torture to be able to
have the pleasure and privilege of getting back in.
The story goes that Kasim, after entering the cave and
loading his horse with all the jewels he could gather, forgets the key words –
“Open Sesame”. Such a simple password, and he couldn’t remember it to save his
life! So, how are we expected to cope with all the complexities of our
multi-password world?
In the early days, when we just had to remember one or two
passwords, it was actually quite cool. Conventional wisdom goes that the first
girlfriend becomes your wife, failing which she becomes your password. I’ve
checked this theory out with quite a few people and believe me, it’s more true
than you would think. I’m quite sure it works the same way for women too. I
keep a close watch on my wife’s password! Incidentally, if any of you know of
someone called Tom Cruise, please let me know – I need to have a serious chat
with the bloke.
All this is fine as far as it is just a password or two. Soon
you start hitting critical mass. You now have accounts for e-mail, bank, the
credit card, the airlines, Facebook, Linkedin. So what’s the big deal, just
maintain the same password for everything and that’s the end of the matter,
right? Wrong! One day, when you log on happily, feeling superior to these damn
machines, they suddenly want you to change your password. It’s all in the name
of security and in your best interests – keep changing your password every 3
months. Sure, will do - anything to stay connected…
But it doesn’t end there. Now the password has to conform to
certain rules. It has to be long. You need some numeric characters in it. You
need to include some of the funnies like # and &. There is even a
Strengthometer sometimes – a bar that measures the strength of your password.
And this one can really make you feel inadequate till you hit upon a
horrendously complicated password with all kinds of funny and easily
forgettable characters and achieve the “Strong” rating.
So now we are deep into the muck. From a time when the only
user ID and password I had to remember were Venkatshankar and Aishwarya_Rai
(remember the girlfriend theme?), I have moved well beyond critical mass. And
with about a zillion passwords to remember, I get 3 chances to guess the right
one on each login! Mostly, I do not. And then what? I click on the most clicked
on link of all times – “Forgot Password? Click here.” And then the password is
sent to me. Except that, it is sent to my mail so that it is secure. And guess
what – I need to remember the mail password to get to my inbox. And so it goes…
There is another infuriating phenomenon for a while now –
all the user ID’s have been taken. Now, when I try to get the monster to accept
my name, it is taken. Taken! With a weird name like mine, I thought there would
be too few of us in the world – but puzzlingly, Venkatshankar1 to
Venkatshankar1000 are all taken! Including all the variants with underscore,
hash and @. So now, apart from passwords, I have to remember a few hundred user
IDs along the lines of FGS358_VL8$3. And don’t even get me started on T-PIN and
other such related scams. Forgot password? Obviously! Forgot User ID? All the time! In fact, forget the whole
online thing – I think I’ll just leg it to wherever and transact with a human
being of some sort…
I know people who seem to have it much easier than me. Maybe
they have a memory like an elephant.
Maybe they store all their passwords in one file. Catch is, this file is
probably password protected. And since your entire online security resides in
that file, chances are that you follow the usual best practices and set a
suitably convoluted password for that file – in which case you are already back
on the old slippery slope!
So where do we go from here? Being the paranoid kind, I am
getting weighed down by my conviction that this is a conspiracy by the
Machines. This password racket is the Machines World’s way of ultimately
locking me out of my bank, my credit card, my airline, my social network and so
on, till I am alone and isolated. You may scoff, but if you do, I recommend you
watch Terminator and Matrix.
I am tired now and am shutting my laptop down. I only hope
that, tomorrow morning, I can remember my Power On password and my mail ID and
password so that I can send this message out in the hope that it reaches
someone who can save the world.
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