I feel like I spend half my life trying to remember passwords. It’s almost impossible to keep them all straight.
I have a password for everything. My bank account. My credit card. The cell phone company. The power company. Amazon.com. The UGA ticket office. I have three email accounts, a personal account, a work account and an account for my part-time teaching gig. And each one of them has a different password.
I understand the need to have different passwords. There was a big story about identity theft recently, and it said Gainesville has the 22nd highest rate of identity theft of any city in the country.
I understand that by having different passwords for all the websites I visit makes it that much more difficult for some bad person to access all my personal information and to steal my identity.
I understand it, but I don’t like it. That’s because I can’t remember 40 different passwords.
When I first started using the Internet years ago, you almost never needed a password. And when you did, it didn’t matter if the password you chose was something short and simple.
I chose “glory,” the name of the black and white springer spaniel that lived at my house, as my password.
Before long, websites started requiring that my passwords be a combination of letters and numbers. So I threw a couple of numbers at the end of “glory” and went about my business.
But then identity theft became a big issue, and websites required your passwords be longer and more complicated to remember. I remember signing up for one website. When I attempted to use my standard “glory” password, the website wouldn’t accept it. It wasn’t long enough.
“Please enter a password that is 8-20 characters long.”
Eight characters? Really? I can barely remember what I ate for lunch yesterday, and I’m supposed to remember an eight-character password? The only thing I could think of with eight characters was “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Didn’t figure that would work as a password.
Now some websites require that passwords include not only letters and numbers, but also special characters, such as “#,” “_,” “*,” or “/.”
So now I have about six different passwords and use one variation every time I sign up for a new site. They all are long. They all have numbers, letters and special characters. And they are all impossible to remember.
A friend suggested downloading a password manager, which will store all my passwords and make it easier to log into sites. I tried it and it works great. The only password I need to remember now is the one to log into the manager.
But my work email and my university email both require me to change my passwords every six months. Unfortunately, I can never remember my old email password. I type it into Microsoft Outlook, which remembers my password, and I don’t think about it again until I get the email message that my password will expire in 14 days.
Honestly, I usually wait until the last minute to change my password, sometimes waiting until I’m locked out. And because I can’t remember the old password, I can’t get a new one.
I asked the IT guy at the university why they make us change passwords so often.
“It’s just an added layer of security,” he said.
Can’t argue with that. It’s so secure, it kept me out of my own email.
