Password Hell!

This is more of a rant than anything else but.....

I think, at one point, I had about 30 to 40 passwords in use and I think I could remember about 10 to 15 of them at best. It’s become ridiculous, everything I do online and at work, I have to use a password and in some cases a username. It’s not bad enough that I have to remember each password but then I have to remember what username goes with what password. It sucks. I’m told that you should not use the same password for multiple things. I’m told that it must be a unique password with numbers, letters and symbols so it’s harder to crack. I have found that I now use about 10 to 15 different passwords and about 5 to 7 usernames. Is this safe, probably not, but at this point I don’t care. I can’t keep up with anymore than that. I could always keep a card full of passwords, usernames and pins in my wallet but that would kind of defeat the purpose of security. Just at work alone, I have 5 different passwords that I use for different things. The worst is buying on line. Every place you buy something from, you have to set up an account with a username and password. It seems like I am constantly hitting the “forgot your password?” button.

Anyway, sorry for the rant. Anyone else is password hell like me? Any tips?

JSE

Try sharing a username and password with someone. For example, my wife started our online banking and she came up with the username and password. I couldn't remember all of mine, much less hers. So, I called and had them changed. Boy, was she pissed!

She's also pissed because she screwed up her paypal account and now everytime she tries to open a new one she gets a message saying that someone else (me) is using our credit card #. She ain't gonna screw up my paypal account!

Back to passwords, I hate it when some sites require you to go through the whole initialize account process when you've forgotten your password. Sometimes you have to wait for an email before you're back in business. I don't change mine up very much but some sites require certain info to be used as a username and some sites restrict the use of symbols or punctuation. I often have to remember not to rely on my memory.