Thou Shalt Not Pass

These days most of our transactions are doing 'online' and you seldom stand in lines(if there was one!).

For most folks of my generation at first it was Banking and train tickets, then it slowly expanded to a whole lot of other bills and shopping . But still there was the domestic help or the watchman who would offer to pay the water bill, electricity bill, gas cyclinder etc, till i left India though i did open online accounts i still used to pay for these through these people letting them have their Rs.10/20 commission. My online purchasing started with books, I had heard about flipkart through friends, but kept advocating the 'experience' factor of a real world small bookshop that i used to visit often and i did enjoy some discount there as a regular. But at some point I started realizing that the discounts online and the comfort of ordering stuff lounging on my couch/bed was too tempting and i succumbed. Books were followed by T-shirts, other stuff and gradually electronics followed. 

Until this point I had only 2-3 websites which i used on a regular basis for e-commerce and there were a couple of travel websites and of course personal email and work mail/system login ...despite security concerns, laziness trumped and  I started using common  passwords both for most of  these sites invariably what i was using at that point at my workplace. At work we had to change password every 45 days. Setting a password was a fun activity and initially i took pride in coming up with smart passwords. But the trouble with password is that they are supposed to be 'secure' and of course 'secret' which is the fundamental expectation. So you can't really go about announcing it on Facebook or Twitter and gloat over the likes/RTs you get! But for my personal usage i kept myself to 2-3 passwords ( best of the lot i came up when setting passwords at work and for my bank account). Now the trouble started when one of my widely used mail accounts got hacked and thanks to being widely present on social media those days i got know instantly that spam mails were being sent and managed to wrest back control of the account. Now since i had used some of the same passwords for lot of things online, I didn't want to take any chances and set-up about creating more complex and complicated passwords and more of them so that not more 2-3 sites had same password. This was the  time the activities done online started increasing and so began the quest for unique yet tough to crack but 'remember-able' passwords

Setting smart and tough to get passwords slowly started becoming a democles sword ( ok, i'm exagerrating) ... I slowly started wondering if mundane will do, but again didnt want to lose the fun part of coming up with some interesting passwords. But after moving to the US of A, things started becoming lot tougher. I now had a couple of different bank acccounts, my workplace demanded seperate set of passwords for different applications, almost all utlity payments were online through seperate accounts with service providers, and i keep discovering lot more e-commerce sites all of which need their own ids and passwords. Since the start of this year i had to go through recover password routine for a couple of sites. But now i have reached the level where i had to recover my user id first and then get the password! I can't help thinking that there should be a better yet secure way ... I know there must be something, hopefully the widespread usage of that new thing is just around the corner. This post was triggered by a casual conversation with my mom who is just approaching 60s. She mentioned that she had to recover her mail password 5 times in last 3 months because she simply keeps forgetting and her memory is no longer what it used to be... if i'm having trouble in 30s I cant imagine what people in 60s and later must be going through and i really hope some better solution comes soon