User Name and Password Hell

The beginning of January is the super bowl of dieting informatics.  I must have gotten over 100 emails from different weight loss and health related companies about joining them in the last week.  I am wondering if even very thin people are getting these too?

There is hardly any new information about dieting that I don’t already know from my years of intensive study.  (Note here, knowing it and following it are two different things.)  Every once in a while a new study or discovered product comes out and in a moment, a very fleeting moment, I am hopeful that there might be an easier way.

Late one night this past week I was tempted by a heath newsletter to sign up for their free monthly information.  I started to fill out the required information when I got to the user name and password section.  There was a note in ALL CAPS that read, “For your own protection, use a different user name and password for every website and change your password monthly.”

WHAT THE HEdouble hockey sticks!!  I just wanted to get a newsletter.  I was not supplying any financial information or personal stuff, like my weight!  Why in the world did I need a user name?  I was not really a user, but a reader and what was the password for to begin with?

I shook my head and like in cartoons of the sixties, little blue birds flew around the crown of my head and my eyes changed from “x’s” to regular eyeballs.  I came to my senses and realized that these people were not going to have any new news for me and I did not need their stinkin’ newsletter after all.

The advice about using a different user name and changing my passwords got me thinking about all the hours I have spent trying to remember my user name or password for all the thousands of sites that require them.  I can only imagine what would happen if I started changing them every month.

The answer could be that I could keep a log of them all, but not on my computer where a hacker could gain control of every newsletter and website I belong to.  I could have a little black book, but my office is currently more like a black hole so that too could be a disaster.

Life was so much easier when we were all only known as the name we were given at birth or married into.  No passwords were required to live.  In this personalized, must be signed-up for everything world it is time that we had the retinal scanner technology as our user name and password, or voice recognition, or thumbprint id.  Whatever it is it has to not involve me needing to create, remember or change any of my identification information.  I’m not that old and I already have trouble keeping this all straight.  It is just too bad that remembering passwords does not use more calories than forgetting them.  At least then I would have an inc