POSTED:
March 25, 2012 12:30 a.m.
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I have so many passwords now for so many websites that I cannot keep them straight.
I have to have a password for everything. My bank account. My credit card. The cable company. The cell phone company. Amazon.com. The UGA ticket office. I even need a password to sign into this newspaper's website.
I understand the need to have different passwords. Elsewhere in today's paper is a story about identity theft and the fact that Gainesville has the 22nd highest rate of identity theft of any city in the country.
I understand that I should make my passwords as complicated as possible so that other can't easily figure them out.
I understand that by having different passwords for all the websites I visit makes it that much more difficult for some bad person to access all of my personal information and to steal my identity.
I understand it, but I don't like it.
When I first started using the Internet years ago, you almost never needed a password. And when you did, it didn't matter if the password you chose was something short and simple.
I chose "glory," the name of the black and white springer spaniel that lives at my house, as my password.
Before long, websites started requiring that my passwords be a combination of letters and numbers. So I threw a couple of numbers at the end of "glory" and went about my business.
But then identity theft became a big issue, and websites starting requiring that your passwords be longer and more complicated to remember. And the IT experts began recommending that we all use a different password for every website on which we have accounts.
I remember signing up for one website. When I attempted to use my standard "glory" password, the website wouldn't accept it. It wasn't long enough
"Please enter a password that is 8-20 characters long."
Eight characters? Really? I can barely remember what I ate for lunch yesterday, and I'm supposed to remember an eight-character password?
The only thing I could think of with eight characters was "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Didn't figure that would work as a password.
Now some websites require that passwords include not only letters and numbers, but also special characters, such as "#," "_," "*," or "/."
So now I have about six different passwords, and use one variation every time I sign up for a new site. They all are long. They all have numbers, letters and special characters. And they are all impossible to remember.
Last week, I went to a website and typed in my password.
I got an error message. "There was an error with your email/password combination. Please try again," it said.
I must have made a typo. I tried the same password again. No luck.
I tried one of my other passwords. It didn't work, either.
After about four more attempts, the website locked me out for exceeding the number of sign-in attempts allowed. So I had to call the company and verify who I was to be allowed access to my account.
I told this story to the newspaper's IT guy one day last week.
"There's a really good way to create a password that will never cause you any trouble," he said.
Do tell, I said.
"Use a favorite quote from a book or movie as your password," he said. "That way you have a capital letter at the beginning and a period at the end, and that takes care of your need for special characters."
It seems foolproof, and I'm excellent at quoting things, from "The Andy Griffith Show" to "Casablanca" to "The West Wing." Now all I need to do is come up with an obscure enough quote from one of my favorite movies, and I shouldn't struggle to remember passwords anymore.
Although it probably sums up my attitude about passwords best, I think it best to reject that famous quote that starts, "Frankly, Scarlett."
Mitch Clarke is executive editor of The Times. His column appears Sundays. Read previous columns at gainesvilletimes.com/mitch. Follow him on Twitter @MitchTimes.
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