PASS(WORD) / FAIL

It's difficult to believe that only five or six years ago, I had little interest in the internet. I was one of those old-fashioned folk who believed the World Wide Web was useless to me, in much the same way I thought ATM's were useless 20 years ago. Of course now I consider both of them indispensible; I can't remember the last time I was in the local branch of my bank to conduct any financial business, and nearly all of my reading, shopping, communication and recreational pursuits are connected in one way or another to the cobalt grey slab of metal from Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard. If I hadn't acquired a taste for the internet you wouldn't be reading this now, but the jury is still out over whether or not that's a good thing.

The bad news is when things go wrong with technology, they can go horribly wrong, as proved Monday morning when I misplaced my pocket-sized telephone and address book. No, it doesn't contain names and addresses of my nearest and dearest (who writes letters these days?); it contains all my internet account user names and passwords. Sure, I can remember a few user name/password combinations such as email and my bank account, but what about all the others, the ones you don't use enough to warrant a permanent slice of brain space? I learned in a terrifying 30 minute search that the loss of the 21st century's version of the "little black book" could mean hours of frustration spent with countless Customer Care Teams trying to sort everything out, and that was a best-case scenario; what it was truly lost only to be found and then used by someone else? That prospect brought on a panic I haven't experienced since I lost my contact lenses three weeks after the expiration of my vision-benefit plan.

Just like the contact lenses though, the book did turn up, found tucked away in the torn pocket lining of a jacket I'd been wearing, but as relieved as I was to find it, I was also troubled at how the loss of this book could cause so much anxiety and chaos in my life. The truth is that practically everything we do online these days, email, banking, mortgage, insurance plans, shopping, forums, newsgroups, ad nauseum is done at the mercy of multiple username and passwords, the volume of which the average person can't possibly be expected to remember. Until someone comes up with a better plan, we're stuck with it though, but to avoid a possible catastrophe, I've devised a back-up plan. Along with my other important papers, I'm keeping a separate list of all my passwords in a fireproof combination-lock box I've just bought.

Hopefully, I won't forget the combination.