I saw a post on FaceBook. Two elderly women are talking about their difficulty in remembering passwords. One of them says, “It drives me mad trying to remember my passwords,” and the other says, “Me too. And then I found a way out. I keep my password as ‘incorrect’, so that every time I type my password wrong the computer will tell me, “Your password is incorrect.”
It is true. If coining a password is an art, remembering it is a skill. There is a certain thrill and challenge in coining a password with the alpha + special characters, and I always make it a point to have a tricky combination that is meaningful and relevant to the apps and accounts I am using.
Recently, when the Twitter account of Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook, was hacked by a group, it was interesting to note that he had his password as “dadada”!
It reminds me of a friend of mine who kept her password for her email account as “Sambarvada”. I chided her for keeping such a stupid password and she quipped, “stupidity goes unchallenged”.
In spite of my uncanny ability to keep in memory a variety of passwords, I too had a fairly amusing stint with handling passwords on a 24/7, dawn-to-dusk basis.
My husband and I go and stay with our son in the United States on a periodic basis and it will always be for six months or one year.
My son lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and when he moved to a new house, which was a single family home, we went to see the new house and stay with them for six months.
It was a beautiful house in three levels. Since the place was prone to tornadoes, almost all the individual houses had a basement level. So the geography of the houses required four main doors opening to the exterior. There was one main door, one garage door, one leading to the deck and one from the basement leading to the patio.
Though it was a well-developed and safe neighbourhood, the norm was to have a security system installed in all houses. All these entrances led to the outer periphery of the house and so considered vulnerable. Hence they were secured by the system and any unauthorised entry would set off an alarm.
And whenever we wanted to open any of these doors, we would have to disarm the security system by entering a password in the keypad of the central monitoring device mounted on the wall. If by mistake we happened to open the doors without disarming, the alarm would go off and a grace time of a few minutes would be allowed to go and disarm. Else, the cops would be all over the house in no time.
So the first thing our son introduced us to was the security system and its functions and the passwords. He told me to memorise the passwords and I felt thrilled at the arrangement and the marvels of technology that made such things possible.
And apart from this, we were asked to memorise another important password that controlled our exit and entry through the garage door.
Normally the automatic garage door is opened from inside by pressing a switch and once the car is taken out the door is closed and opened through a device fixed in the car.
In case we wanted to take our grandsons to the park, we would have to go through the garage door, since the bicycle or the stroller would have to be taken out. During such times we could open the garage door from inside and once we were out, to close back the door, we would have to enter a password in a tiny keypad mounted on the wall near the door. And the same procedure had to be followed to let ourselves in, on return.
And then the masterpiece came. The security system was equipped with a secret password to be used in an emergency, and they called it “Password Under Duress”.
My son explained: “If someone gatecrashes into the house, God forbid, and threatens you at gunpoint to disarm the security system, then you must use this password. It is all built into the security package.” And he joked: “I know, ma, this password will be etched in your memory.”
I felt I couldn’t take any more of this password business. I asked, “There is not a single soul on the street. Is not this security level a bit too much?”
Count my blessings, nothing like that happened… if at all someone forced/threatened me and I had to use the “password under duress”, it was only my little grandson who would demand that — so he could go out and play, in the snow.
newshara@yahoo.com
