Gosh—is it just us who are so dumb that we never seem to remember what our passwords are? We all know that these days, without knowing your password you basically can no longer find out anything about your life. Want to know what your address is??? Please put in your password—it’s four letters—at least one upper case—two numbers and three characters. Okay, so we ask ourselves: is it Zaidie—so original—is it mordechaigl—no one would think of that—how about bubbie1—does anyone remember? We for sure do not. We made a decision to leave a book near our computer with all of our passwords entered into it alphabetically.
It seems as though that would be a no-brainer in order to expedite our problem with remembering. Yes—we have the password—oh no that has now expired, please enter a new password. We have resorted to our grandchildren’s names—it seems so original. Who else would be Chaviva1 (our first great-grandchild) as a password? Then we realized we forgot the exclamation point. Or did we use Malkiegl—our first daughter—or is it 5876cent??? Our old address in Montreal?
Help!! There has to be a better way. Yesterday, Nina called Verizon to ask them about the new rules and regulations that they are instigating in their system, and about the fact that they sent her a letter several weeks ago informing her that they are discontinuing the Canada-American plan.
She already knew after several minutes of them asking for her password to just keep pushing 0 until someone gets on the line. Nina said, “Ask me where my mother was born, what my mother-in-law’s maiden name was, but please do not ask me my password.” It worked. She was able to tell them that the NY Yankees were still her favorite baseball team. Yes, we found out that as long as we do not change our Verizon plan to anything else they will allow us to maintain the Canada-American plan.
After that call Nina needed to call TD Bank, and once again she needed to immediately provide them with her password. “How about my mother-in-law’s maiden name?” she asked. They declined that suggestion but did ask what her husband’s elementary school was in Malden, Massachusetts. Of course, that was a fact that she was immediately able to provide. Still suspicious though: what was the model of the first car that you ever drove? At that point the person asking the questions was laughing along with Nina.
Before writing this, Nina actually researched what the best passwords are and what the most common are. Believe us that neither Mordechai nor Chaviva are very common. The problem is that when you have the delight of having as many grandchildren and great-grandchildren as we do, it becomes more and more difficult to recall which name you used last. When did this phenomenon begin?
We remember the days when we could just call the telephone company and ask a question about our bill and no one asked us for our pedigree. We went to the bank and managed without an ATM and got to know the tellers. The only chip that we really knew about was when one had one on their shoulder.
Finally, after spending hours trying to come up with a strategy that we hope will work in the future, we have decided on our best password which hopefully can be applied wherever we need it. It will be Forgot!!!!!!! That way if it is too long we can always remove a few of the exclamation points!
By Rabbi Mordechai and Nina Glick
