Are too many passwords driving you crazy?

So many devices and so many passwords. I have to say that I have had a frustrating time with passwords lately. My damn Yahoo account was hacked last week – causing me lots of stress. Basically the virus sent an email to all my contacts and actually siphoned some of the subject lines I had really used for them – so many of my contacts opened the virus and got slightly terse with me.

It got everyone. My Yahoo account is over a decade old, so everyone I know (practically) was affected – even those people I wish that I had no contact with anymore – like old boyfriends and companies I once went for jobs at.

I found this great article on the power off the password. The author of the post made a ‘positive affirmation’ password to focus on his goals and claims that it worked wonders for him.

For example, he really wanted to forgive his ex-wife, so he made his password forgive@her. He had to type the password in multiple times a day and by doing so, was able to connect with the message and move on from his past.

I also had some IT issues at work – all the more reasons not to make your password something embarrassing. Mine was not that embarrassing – but it did contain my birthdate!

I once read a story about a woman at a video shop. Yup, back in the day before on-demand and before streaming and even before DVD – there was video.

Anyway – the lady decided to have a little fun one night. She had recently split from her long time boyfriend and decided that she wanted to “explore herself”. Feeling brave (but not too brave) she headed to her local video store and went straight to the “back section” where the “adult” movies were.

She picked a couple of titles off the rack, and embarrassedly took them to the counter, where a young man was serving. She handed him the videos and blushed deeply.

“What’s your password, Ma’am?” he asked.

“Ummmm,” she blushed, “Ahhhhh…”

He looked at her and raised his eyebrow. “I need to know your password, Ma’am,” he said directly.

“Uh,” she said, looking down at the adult movies on the counter. “It’s EASY.”

She blushed a deeper shade or red, quickly paid for her videos and dashed out of the store.

She’d thought that the password would be EASY to remember – but now the video store guy just thought she was a different kind of EASY herself!