I was not going to write because there is one good piece on this already by
silverine but then the blogger insisted that I too post it.. so here it goes...
A couple of days back as I opened my mailbox in the morning, the first mail I opened stood with the subject "ACTION REQUIRED: Time to Change Your Domain Account Password". I had still another 15 days to do it.
I had 2 options:
1. Change the passwd right away
2. Wait for 14 days and change it.
If I chose the first option, I would have to right away think of a password with letters from both upper case and lower case, numbers and special characters sitting in it. And yes, I could not start it with number or special character.
I have used up all my creativity so far with
- My first crush along with my dad's oldest scooter's license plate number.
- My second crush along with my dad's oldest scooter's license plate number.
-
-
- and so on till I could find no more crushes.
- "somebody's" name, birthdate and a cryptic number sequence only I can make sense of.
- Titles of my fav books annotated with exclamations and numbers and special characters.
- birth dates and names of people I could remember.
- conversion rates between some currencies
Yup, this looked a daunting task. I needed time for that.
Now, if I took the second option, I would be mercilessly flooded with reminder mails everyday till I changed my passwd or I kept on "shift-deleting" it till the passwd expired.
Here is where the rules wizard is helpful. I put a filter for that subject and a reminder to change the passwd after 14 days. So that set, the inevitable procrastinated, I set to dwelve on the creative part of the job.
This took me to the very first time I set a passwd for any account. Back in 1997, when I just stepped into the computer world at my college [the octagon] as we used to call it.. I was handed over an account with a preset password which was probably my name or roll no. suffixed with 123. So easy.
I took the help of a friend and thought for about 30 minutes for my first password. No, I am not telling it :) .. for I still use it at a number of places. So easy to remember and so cryptic for anyone to guess. Those were the days when you did not have enforcement of upper case, lower case, numbers and special characters.
Soon I ventured into the internet mails.. mailcity, hotmail, yahoo and score of others. All of them carried the same passwd and they still do.
With that taken care of, the rest of my college life passed on without much of password events.. except for the occassional self memory reset and then getting the passwd from the admin as the roll no. suffixed with 123.
Then a few moons later I joined the corporate world. And started the agony with passwords.
The policy said:
- It could not contain ur name
- not ur birth date
- not ur employee number
- not the last used 5 passwds
- and blah blah
What it did not say and I discovered later was it had some kind of intelligence to recognize similar passwds.. passwds with only a couple of numbers or characters changed and it slapped me outright with a message "password not changed. Very similar to last one. Plz try again"
So, I could not use the last 5 passwds [I hardly remember the present one.. remembering the last 5 was out of question], I could not use passwds very similar to the last 5 ones also.
So this quarterly task started taking a huge 30 minutes for me to figure out what was the correct one for this time.
So frustrated was I once with this task, that I accidently used this passwd IwillkillU!
It slapped me.. password does not have a number.
I tried 1willkillU!
It punched, password cannot start with a number
I tried iwillkill1_1!
It smacked, no upper case in the passwd.
I gave up and tried something that i don't remember. It accepted it!!!!
But what the hell did I type? $%^#%#$%^#$
So I clicked, forgot passwd. It said, passwd reset and sent it thru mail.
Now the whole task started all over again.
That is when I started using all those crushes, license numbers, titles etc.
Having used up all those things, now I am left out again with something new to think about.
I don't like using the old passwds again [anyways I do not remember them].. it's like accepting defeat that u cannot be creative enough in thinking up a new passwd [the one u can remember for the next 90 days].
Now I had so many passwds to change in the corporate world that I synced up all of them to expire around the same time. That way at least I can change them all on same day with the same passwd.
What I found out that though this was an excellent energy saver policy, one of the account passwds accepted only 8 character passwds. So in order to have synced up passwds, I needed an 8 letter passwd with number, special character, upper case and lower case all together.
I wonder if we Indians have a password god to worship? I would probably do an one legged meditataion till he appeared and granted me a never ending 8 letter passwd repository. [Okay don't give me the combination crap, that there are only so many characters and so many 8-char passwds u can make out of it.]
People plz help me.