%$&*@

Not cursing ;) I promise.

My husband sat down with me a few years ago and discussed NOT having our daughter's birthday be my password. (joking...I am NOT that stupid.) We talked about random capitalization, non-dictionary words, anagrams, and symbols. I created the perfect, in my humble opinion, password.

Want to know what it is? Huh, huh? Do ya?

Well, I'll tell you. It is an anagram of a movie quote. The caps are not random. It uses symbols for some of the letters. Good luck with that.

My computer nerd IT DH would probably not agree with he fact that I made this my default password. I am sure he would say "But, if someone finds it out then they can get into everything." Yeah, blah blah blah, whatever

I do have a secondary password that I devised when I realized that my movie quote was not 8 characters and some sites required longer passwords. I did't mind that; extra secure, you know. That password is a random intersting word I chose just because with a few l33t characters tossed in so I can pretend to be cool. Despite being longer I do not consider it as secure as the movie quote.

That is neither here nor there.

The dumb old phone company seems to be stuck in the 1980's. They want my online password to contain letters and numbers only! What?! I used to work at the phone company. Let me tell you...our login passwords in billing were not "letters and numbers only." We were REQUIRED to use symbols.

Neither my movie quote nor secondary password use only numbers and letters. OK, third password devised. *sigh*

Hurray for Windows remembering this stuff for me, right? (Don't get me started. I do lean on that crutch more than I should.) Yeah, until I get a nasty virus on my PC and have to start using the laptop for important things like paying the mortgage, paying the phone bill, and updating my blog. What? You mean being stored within 30 feet of my PC for a couple of months hasn't miraculously saved my passwords onto the laptop? Dang!

The mortgage password didn't give me too much trouble. I knew it was either the movie quote or the secondary. Took me forever to rememer my user id. There's some irony for you. It came to me last night in a wee-hour-epiphany (interesting day for an epiphany, eh?) No problem, got that paid before it even counts as late (barely.) I didn't want to login and pay that on the infected computer.

The phone bill was more trouble. Somehow the wrong user id was saved on the login page. That is it's own headache. I finally remembered what it was, but between that and trying my two passwords (on a site that uses neither) I got flagged with a "You have tried too much, go away and come back tomorrow, Loser" message. Annoying
There was a work around, though. I got in and changed my password to something that only uses numbers and letters. We'll see in a month whether I can remember it without help.