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I’m old (ancient?) enough to remember a time when I had no passwords. Not a single one.

The first one I acquired if for my now long defunct hotmail account (Props to anyone who remembers what it was. I still use the non @hotmail part of that address on far too many forums and websites. Perhaps not a wise move. I was eighteen when I came up with that name. A particularly idiotic and sartorially challenged eighteen.), and then another for my next email account, and then a third and a fourth. It’s gotten to the point that I do not even bother to remember my passwords anymore. It’s easier to pretend that I have forgotten the password and have it emailed to the one account whose password I do remember.(That is a cunning lie, I never bothered to commit the passoword to memory, so I cannot claim to have forgotten it. It makes me feel like a criminal mastermind.)

And I am also paying the price for other peoples stupidity. Using your name as a password isn’t a good idea. Yes, I know that. Unfortunately some people do not. And every password now brings with it a whole set of rules. One of the first eight letters must be uppercase; they should contain a number and a symbol. The symbol can be one that you can type with your middle finger of your right hand when the index finger of the same hand is on “x” and the ring finger is on “z”. The password should not contain more than three letters in sequence. Other disallowed sequences are the natural alphabetical sequence, the first letter of the days of the week, and any letters which sound the same if you are standing in a wind tunnel with a jet engine roaring behind you.

I can hardly wait for the day when I can have a chip implanted in me, something that will allow me to access my email if I twitch the appropriate appendage. By appropriate appendage I mean my finger. Get your filthy minds out of the gutter!

And while I am dwelling on prehistory, the first game I ever played on a computer was PC Pool. This was back in ’90 or ’91. On a friends computer, with a black and white monitor. Without a mouse. The instructions for the game possessed a charming simplicity and directness: Hit the Space Bar to shoot the ball.

And, I’m not kidding, but for the first few weeks that I played the game, I waited with eager anticipation for a drinking establishment with aliens in it. Aliens who would be gathered around a pool table… perhaps playing pool or a variant, billiards maybe. Or maybe not even that, maybe just aliens hanging about a bar, getting drunk and setting their passwords.

Eventually I did realize that they meant I needed to hit that long bar shaped key, the one that was used to type out blank spaces. This realization made me sad.

I never have quite gotten over that traumatic disappointment.