Passwords

Does anybody else think that computer passwords have gotten a little out of hand? About a year a go I decided to do all of my banking online. I signed up for online statements with banks, credit cards, student loans and my cell phone. Now, each one of these accounts has a different log-in name and password. I would have loved to use one log-in name and password so it would be easy to remember. That is not the case. Each company had a specific requirement for the log-in name and password and I’m taking about requirements way beyond adding a number at the end or a capital letter in the beginning.

No, some of these companies wanted special characters, while other companies wouldn’t allow them. The number of characters varied as well, some companies required no more than 7, while others required 6-10. Not to mention the companies that require a user to change the password every 30 days, and other companies that require a change every three months. It seems like every time I log on, I have to change the password for some account. At one point in time I counted 16 different companies, 11 different log-in names, and 10 different passwords and the list keeps growing.

Just the other day I was ordering pictures online through Walmart and I had to create a username and password. This very blog requires a username and password. It seems like I can’t do anything online without having to create a log-in name and password.

It got to the point where I would have log-in failures because I couldn’t remember my log-in name or password. How bad is that? I can’t even access my own account. I guess that is just really good security?

Trying to remember passwords and usernames got so bad that a few months ago I created a word document with all the companies, log-in names and passwords just so I wouldn’t have to try and remember it all. Think about it. I couldn’t remember my passwords so I had to put them down in writing. Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of a password? Now, if anyone saw this document with all the company names, passwords and such, they could have the account information of every single account that I have. How scary is that? What good is a password if I can’t even remember it?