Many years ago, I happened to watch part of an episode of the “Beavis and Butthead” cartoon series.
“Numbers suck!” said Butthead. “I’m, like, angry at numbers.”
Beavis shot back with this: “Yeah, there’s like too many of ‘em ‘n’ stuff!”
I burst out laughing because I could identify with their numbers frustration. I’m lousy at math. In grade school, I’d grit my teeth and sweat as I clutched my pencil trying to figure out workbook math problems. There would be little piles of eraser crumbs on my desk top and on the floor. I have math dyslexia, technically termed “discalculus,” as my banker informed me a few years ago.
I wish Beavis and Butthead would do an update – not on numbers but on PASSWORDS.
“Passwords suck!” Butthead would say. “I’m, like, angry at passwords.”
Beavis would shoot back with this: “Yeah, there’s like too many of ‘em ‘n’ stuff.”
I couldn’t remember a password if my life depended on it. Well, I do remember a few of them – the ones I have to use every day. But the rest? The other hundreds of them? Just one big migraine blur.
My office desktop is a virtual blizzard of passwords, the ones I use most often. Little slips of paper are taped here, there, everywhere. Honky3Tonky, 27Grumpy$, 45Cooper&*^ and on and on as they multiply like rabbits.
When I’m asked to think up a new password, my mind goes blank as I get a mini panic attack. In frantic desperation, I glance over at my bookshelves seeking an author’s name: Dickens, Stendhal, Joyce, Orwell, Hemingway, Faulkner, Nabokov . . . I choose an author’s name, then gussy it up with numbers and a constellation of symbols: 78Nabokov%&#.
Then I scribble down each new password and TRY to remember to put it on my passwords list – page after page of typed and hand-scrawled passwords, passwords, passwords. Aargh!
When I go online to order something (recently Sam’s Club, for instance), I couldn’t find my password among the roiling sea of passwords on my long lists or taped all over my computer desk. The Sam’s Club site said, “Forgot your password?” Well, duh. What a dumb question. Why doesn’t every website have an option that states, “Forgot your password AGAIN?”
My bank makes me think up a new password every few months. OK, for security. I understand. But still, what a pain in the neck.
One of my nieces, a financial director in a Twin Cities hospital, told me she uses ONE password for everything. She admits that might be risky, but like me she is sick and tired of thinking up new ones. I just might follow her lead, risky or not, because I’ve had it up to here with pesky passwords.
So many times I vowed I would start having all my passwords tattooed all over my body so I wouldn’t lose or forget them. But every time I vowed that, my thoughts came to a screeching halt: Nope, not enough skin on my body. I could get fat – I mean even fatter – and there still wouldn’t be enough skin.
Just the other night I had a nightmare. I was surrounded and then attacked by swarms of passwords, like nasty stinging wasps. I woke up in a sweat.
Years ago, I interviewed the novelist LaVyrle Spencer for a news-feature story. She was so intelligent. I told her she must have been a top student in school.
“Well, I was good at all the subjects,” she said, pausing. “All except math.”
“You too?!” I practically shouted.
“Dennis, I could be perfectly happy living in a world without numbers.”
“You and me both!” I assured her.
I wish I could interview LaVyrle Spencer again. I’d be sure to ask her about passwords, and I’d bet a dime to a doughnut, she’d say this: “Dennis, I could be perfectly happy living in a world without passwords.”
