The Password You Attempted Is not Valid

I hate passwords. They were specifically designed by the software industry to make our lives hell and remove any blame for that state of hell from themselves. "O, well, you failed to give yourself a secure password, so it's not our fault you got hacked". "O, you forgot your password, then we'll have to give you a tomato flogging and an anal probe and then maybe if you let us fuck your mother we'll change it for you, and maybe even tell you what we've changed it to."

Depending on what security software a website, program or file is using, there are about 5,000 different standards of password protocol. Like "must end in a number", "must not end in a letter", "must contain at least 3 numbers and 2 letters and one of the following special characters: !@#$?>:(", "must have three numbers followed by four letters followed by two more numbers whilst still being only 8 characters total and utilizing no 'm' or '6' and cannot look like your name or sound like anyone you know when phonetically pronounced in a Semitic language".

Most people can't have just one or two passwords, due to these different requirements across numerous applications. Gawd knows we all try - most of us minimize the number of passwords we have by transforming our favorite flower or dog or sexual position into an alpha-numeric string which fulfills the requirements of the application in question. Then, of course, there's the fact that we are not allowed to memorize our passwords or familiarize ourselves with the different places we use different passwords, since most sites and applications force us to change passwords every few months/years. As a result, we're all in a perpetual state of terror every time we want to check our credit card balance or read our email or download that new porn video. We know in the back of our minds that it's only a matter of time before we get to a page where they tell us "that password is not valid", and we can't figure out what password we were supposed to use.

So you know what we do? We write our passwords down on a piece of paper and put it in our wallet. Or we keep them in a spreadsheet or text file on our computer's desktop for reference. We make sure they're handy, both for ourselves and for anyone who is planning on committing identity theft or fucking with us. Or we password protect the file in which they live so that we can ensure the need to one day be required to go site-by-site, program-by-program and change each password individually because we lost/forgot the password to our passwords file.

Of course, some software companies have used this problem (which they created) in order to come up with new software which stores your passwords, or new hardware which converts your password into something like a card swipe or thumb print reader. Nice that all you have to do to add shareholder value in some companies is to create and sell shitty applications and then market a solution to all the problems your own applications cause.

I, of course, tend to deal with password terrorism in all of the above ways: I try to use the same password for as long as a program will allow me, and only use permutations of the same word or phrase as often as possible. Sometimes I write the wierdest ones on a post-it on my monitor, others I store in a file called "passwords.xls" on my desktop. Finally, I often find myself at the mercy of some customer service drone asking them to help me reset my password so that I can log onto their site for the first time in eight months and subsequently forget the password again before I need to return.

In the end, those of us unable to maintain perfect memorization of every password we've ever had perform a small, silent rebellion each time we use one of these coping mechanisms. A list of passwords taped to your computer might not make you feel secure against thieves and bandits, but it sure makes me feel secure against the senseless idiots who require me to use passwords at all...