Annie Dear: What’s my newest password? Don’t ask

Generally speaking, I love technology. Oh I don’t need to know how it works, as quite frankly that would completely addle my brain. I just need it to work when I want it to.

I love it that my computer – a marvel in and of itself – can have a quiet little chat with the printer that is not only in a different room, but on a different floor – and command it to print something of my choosing, and glorious technicolor or functional black and white, and by the time I go to retrieve the paper, there it is sitting in the little tray, veritably panting for my praise and a possible treat.

It’s a reciprocal arrangement too. I can take a piece of paper down to the printer, push an obviously magic button which causes the machine to take an instant picture of whatever I’ve fed it, and by the time I get back upstairs, there is the document on my computer’s desktop.

And it doesn’t stop there. I can then open a program that will take that document and neatly pin it to an email and then off it goes into the ether and land, say, in my darling Sir’s inbox – not 3 feet from me – or clear across the world to my brothers, E’s and TJT’s, inboxes in approximately the same amount of time, only they’re 9,000 miles away.

I can then spend many a happy hour researching any number of interesting bits and pieces and get immediate and accurate answers, making the Encyclopedia Britannica purchased in 1980 rather redundant. I mean, face it, the set was rendered redundant approximately 32 seconds before it was even published.

I can read my books on my Kindle, a fact which startles me to this day. I always thought I was a stalwart paper fan, and that I couldn’t possibly enjoy a book I couldn’t feel and smell. Remember the smell of books when you were a kid? It was a special smell, and even now I will give a real book an olfactory once over just in case I can detect a replication of my old Enid Blytons or A.A. Milnes.

But now I read my books on this little piece of sterile technology, and I enjoy them just the same. After all, I now no longer need a bookmark; I don’t need to worry about dog-earing a page or tearing the book cover. When I leave it, I don’t need to worry that the pages will flap shut and I will lose my place, and I don’t face the daunting task of lugging heavy tomes with me when I go on vacation.

The only thing I have to concern myself with is when I have to turn it off as the plane takes off and lands, and occasionally plugging it in for a revitalizing recharge, which, of course, happens when I am conveniently asleep and not in reading mode.

I can pay my bills, pay my taxes, renew my license plates, play a game and write my column all online. With not so careful planning, I don’t need to do anything face to face; I can do everything from the comfort and privacy of my own home.

There’s one tiny drawback though.

For every bill I pay, every account I want to access, I need a password.

Now I’m not sure about this, but I suspect the first password was coined in a mythical scenario when Aladdin uttered the immortal words “Open Sesame,” later being translated to “Joe sent me” when one wanted in to a speakeasy in Chicago in the ’30s.

All very simple, but the ne’er-do-wells of the times – just like now – managed to screw it all up for everyone else, and Aladdin’s cave found itself invaded by nogoodnick marauders, and the speakeasies were raided by the Feds, so easy were the passwords to crack.

Consequently you have to come up with more and more complex passwords so that those who wish you harm can’t get at you. Nowadays you have to come up with a unique password, using letters and numbers and punctuation marks. Well that’s all very fine and dandy, but somehow you have to remember all these weird and wonderful combinations so that you’re ready to spit them out when requested. Therefore, you end up having to write them down somewhere, in an odd sort of shorthand so that the potential hackers hopefully won’t be able to translate.

I almost met my match today. We have a new and apparently wonderful program that will weed out spam so that it can’t even get into your junk folder.

Naturally, upon first logging in, I had to provide a password – for which, I might add, no parameters were visibly set. No, “you need 9 characters being made up of two punctuation marks, three capital letters, two numbers and a modicum of Swahili.”

So in I blunder – and 20 minutes later I’d satisfied the wretched thing. It wouldn’t accept even the smallest remotest possible dictionary word, so in a fit of pique I gritted my teeth and thought of the foulest string of four-letter words I could think of, and took the first initials.

It seemed to like it, so I settled for it.

But of course, I had to write it down, now didn’t I?