Password perplexity

Written by Joe Pisani
Thursday, 03 December 2009 01:00

My life almost came to a screeching halt when I forgot the password to my 401(k) — largely because I’ve avoided looking at the dismal results for the past year and eliminated the word “retirement” from my vocabulary.

Then, I forgot the password to my Verizon voicemail — largely because I hate voicemail and never check it, which meant my mailbox was full and my wife couldn’t leave me a message complaining about my credit card bill, and my daughter couldn’t beg me to change her oil.

I also forgot the password to my AOL dial-up account — largely because dial-up ended a century ago, and I never canceled it.

I fiddled around with them for a while, wracking my middle-aged brain to remember the passwords — birthdays, anniversaries, dates from the Mayan calendar — until they froze me out.

Resetting them was a major hassle. First, I had to call my former colleague in human resources to get the phone number for Fidelity, and then I had to plead for help and get a temporary password until I could create a new one, which wasn’t worth the effort because my 401(k) was still hemorrhaging.

Next, I had to call my Internet phone provider and listen to several rounds of automated phone options before I got a living person to help me. AOL needed to know my “school” before they would let me cancel the account, so I named every school I attended from Mother Goose Nursery to Sears Driver’s Ed and some I never attended like Harvard and Oxford, but that didn’t work. Five days later, and everything is under control again.

I’m clearly suffering from password overload, and sometimes I think I have more security measures than the White House. When I was younger, the only thing I had to remember was the combination to my gym locker, but now, I even have to remember the combination to the men’s room in the office building where I work.

You can’t do anything without a password. You can’t go on a Web site and leave a nasty comment, you can’t spend your hard-earned cash on Amazon, you can’t get into your e-mail account, you can’t disarm your home-security system ... or do any of the things you never had to worry about back in the olden days when your biggest decision was which Swanson TV dinner to heat up while you watched I Love Lucy.

We live in a world where you need passwords for everything from the ATM to the Teabag of the Month Club to prevent criminals — not to mention our kids — from stealing our identity, our credit cards and our savings and do something insane like paying the mortgage without our permission.

Passwords can be frustrating, especially since security experts insist you should have about 25 letters and numbers and symbols, upper and lowercase, so no one can crack the code.

One fellow I know had an easier solution.

“It’s simple,” he said. “Mine are all the same — p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d.”

Joe Pisani has been a writer and editor for 30 years. E-mail comments to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .