Being paranoid about passwords

The IT guys in my office have turned me into a suspicious person who can’t seem to trust anyone anymore.

“There are very bad people out there on the Internet who wish to control your laptop and your life,” they had warned me when I had started working. And apparently the only way to hinder the evil designs of the bad guys was to fabricate a password that cannot be breached.

The best password, they said, is to have a mix of alphabets, upper and lower case, numbers and symbols like the ones for and (&) or at the rate of (@). I am not sure why this accounting symbol @ is used in email IDs.

The geeks said it would be better if I used a password which was eight characters long and one that I could easily remember. Which was easy for them to say so, because whoever can remember something like this: E&4z9lol, unless you write it down on a post-it note and stick it on your laptop?

Charged by the pep talk from the IT guys and happy that I was capable of confounding the big, evil brains of the hackers, I seriously got down to business. A password with my wife’s name and her birthdate would be easy to remember, I told myself.

So, I tapped the upper and lower case letters, for the alphabets in her name, on the top-most row on the keyboard. Now her birthdate, I said gloating since my password was coming along fine like a secret message in those old spy movies. Suddenly I realised that I didn’t remember her date of birth.

I couldn’t call her at home and ask because that would be treading on dangerous ground. One fateful year I had forgotten her birthday and for weeks I had to endure a frosty silence and my favourite food seemed to have vanished from the menu.

Discouraged by my password-making, I realised that I was wasting my time since no one in his right mind would want to hack into my Outlook messages. Every day I receive tonnes of junk mail in my inbox and some days I can’t keep up with it and have to put off deleting them till the weekend.

Most of my personal free time now is spent on deleting mail, either on my laptop or my smart phone, since both of them are now in sync.

Over the years, I have amassed a number of passwords, for my Amazon account, souq.com account, my bank account, my Skywards points account and so on. I saved all of them in a special folder in my smart phone.

The other day, my BlackBerry slipped off my fingers and landed on its head. It was in its protective cover, but that apparently didn’t help. I quickly picked it up and looked at it anxiously. There was a fine line running across the screen and I couldn’t access anything inside the phone, specially the passwords, without which my life comes to a standstill.

I rushed to the nearest phone repair shop. The man looked at it and said the screen was broken. I said “I know”. He asked me whether I had sat on it. Apparently, people do that a lot — sit on their phones. He said it would cost me Dh300 to get a new screen.

Even if he had said Dh1,000 I would have agreed because foolishly, I had not synchronised my Blackberry with my laptop and downloaded my passwords, my contact phone numbers — and the date of birth of my wife!

Since that day, I carry all my passwords in a flash drive. Now I am paranoid that I will lose that as well.