The other day, I saw my neighbour Raj walking up the road chanting something. “What mantra are you chanting?” I asked out of curiosity. He signalled ‘do not disturb’ and briskly walked away. His behaviour was strange. He had never ignored me or left without saying a ‘Hello’. In the evening, he called me and apologised,“I was going to the bank chanting a six digits PIN so that I don’t forget it.”
When I asked him why he couldn’t write it down in a notebook or store it in his mobile phone, Raj replied saying, “Mobiles can be snatched away by bike-riding thieves.”
He then went on to discuss his struggles with the passwords and pins that have become keys to today’s digital life.
“The other day I used a wrong pin at a vendor’s POS machine thrice and my account got locked. I had to go to the bank and give an application to unlock and reset my password,” he said.
“If you keep your passwords simple, it will be easy to remember,” I suggested.
Raj soon became livid and said, “Don’t dismiss an old man’s plight so lightly. I am worried about safeguarding and recalling all the user IDs and passwords of innumerable transactions. All my retirement benefits are deposited in mutual funds and term deposits and savings accounts. I have different user IDs and passwords for each mutual fund account and bank accounts apart from PINs for ATM and credit cards usage.”
Online ticket booking, house tax, income tax, electricity and water tax payments all have different user IDs and passwords. “Some need a capital letter, a special character and numeric character and lengthy password consisting of 8 to 12 characters,” he lamented.
“I have filled up a diary with all the user IDs and passwords though I am not supposed to write them down. It is humanly not possible to remember 20 and odd user IDs and passwords. I cannot carry the diary around lest I lose it somewhere and then go searching for it everywhere.”
“Your wife is younger and must be having a better memory. Why don’t you leave it to her?” I suggested.
“She believes in physical money transactions. She has been advising me to jettison passwords and go back to the good old method of signed paper transactions,” Raj smirked.
P Subramanian
Email: mailpsubramanian@gmail.com