The company I used to work for had an IT system that automatically prompts us to change our passwords every couple of months.
And there were lots of passwords to change – Windows startup, AT & T Network client, Lotus Notes, Sametime, Lotus Notes Traveler on our iPhones, etc.
All that plus the passwords on our own private stuff – like those for our Amazon account, Gmail, etc.
And we can’t just input any crap as a password – most of the time, it has got have at least eight characters and in alpha-numeric as well, plus, we can’t re-use passwords or the first or last couple of characters in our previous password.
This can be a real nightmare. Our IT guys used to tell us that a password has got to be easy to remember but hard to crack; passwords are like underwear, we shouldn’t leave them out where people can see them, we should change them regularly and we shouldn’t loan them out to anyone, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah we know all that but how the heck are we going to generate all those passwords every so often and still remember them?
A colleague of mine had a brilliant idea – he used all his ex girlfriends’ names and significant dates associated with them. Example: “bellaMILFMay2;1stBJ.” It worked fine till his wife found the list lying around one day and almost castrated him.
Another wrote all his passwords on a piece of paper and stuck that paper on the monitor of his PC, which defeats the whole idea of having passwords, right?
I’ve used everything imaginable – from the names of my favorite cigars to my favorite pipe tobacco blends to the names of the dogs I had, to my favorite single malts, etc.
Of course I can always use a password generator, but one cannot never remember passwords generated by them!
Oh it’s such a pain, really.