And can I have the first and last letter of your password?

I really hate passwords. When I was a child the only password I knew was the one in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves – Open Sesame. Oh how things have changed.

Now I need a bloody password for everything. Of course you can’t have just one generic password. Oh no, that would be far too easy. Some passwords have to have a mixture of Upper and Lower case, some have to have numbers and some can only contain letters. It’s a nightmare. We are living in password hell.

I have a password for my bank account, one each for my credit cards, two for my email accounts, one for my Amazon account, not to mention the one I had for my work computer, the one for the DVD shop and the one for my Ocado account. I am going password crazy.

Passwords are fine if you use them all the time but if you don’t and you have the memory of a ninety five year old (I have) then it can be a bit of a problem. Recently I had to call one of my credit card companies. Now, I don’t call them very often and naturally I had forgotten my password (which I use about once a year). So, the call centre operator asks me for my password and I can’t remember it. The fact that I had my card number, my address, my date of birth, the place where I was born and details of the last transaction I made didn’t seem to matter to the credit card company. No. I had to give them my password. After going through every password I could think of (so now the whole office and the person on the telephone knew all my top secret passwords. Great). In the end I had to admit that I had forgotten it and all my security settings had to be reset. And all I wanted to do was check my balance.

When you enter a password on a website it always reminds you not to tell reveal it to anyone. I bloody wish. It takes all my strength to remember it in the first place.

And my favourite password of all? I b l o o d y h a t e p a s s w o r d s