DEAR Jasminda,

I SEEM to spend half my life trying to remember my passwords and then having to go through the process of resetting them. How can I save them so they are safe and memorable?

Pauline W.

Dear Pauline,

Passwords. Remember the time when there were no passwords, and no computerised filing systems? No, back then, to lock things away, you’d just have to remember where you left the key to your actual filing cabinet, and then you’d have to drag those heavy drawers out on their rusted tracks, and then flick through hundreds of manilla folders in suspension files.

Those were the days.

Now we have to log in to everything and our passwords have to be ridiculous combinations of letters and numbers and special characters and they also have to be different from the passwords we’ve used in the past, which we couldn’t remember when logging in, but which now come to us with crystal clear clarity along with the message ‘previously used password – try again’.

But none of this is as depressing as the password backup method where you have to answer previously recorded questions and answers.

These questions include things like ‘what street did you live in when you were in highschool?’ and ‘what job did you want when you were young?’

When I answer these questions, I forget all about logging into a program that records my receipts and reconciles my bank statements, because I am instead on a trip down memory lane, when I lived on a leafy street in the northern beaches and I wanted to be a veterinary surgeon, which would certainly have paid more than my current occupation.

You could perhaps do what my father did, and store all your passwords in a file that is named something so obscure that no one would think to open it.

The problem with this one, as my father discovered, is that he couldn’t remember the filename either. It ended up being dementia (the filename that is).
Carpe diem,
Jasminda.