The concept of user name and password may have been introduced to protect the personal information that belongs to an individual human being from the rest of humanity. So it is supposed to be a useful concept. Except that, these days it has become a rather irritating one. The sheer number of the user name and passwords is the problem. I guess I have a minimum of 15 user name password pairs. The pain of remembering them, and the procedures that you have to follow if you forget them... Aaargh!
Let me try listing the names of user id password pairs I have. Please note that these are the ones that I regularly use.
Official
1. The IBM intranet uid/password
2. The lotus notes uid/password
3. The uid/password of the client network that I work for from IBM
Personal
1. Google account uid/password
2. Yahoo account uid/password
3. MoneyControl.com uid/password
4. Cricinfo.com uid/password
5. facebook.com uid/password
6. linkedin.com uid/password
Banking/Finance
1. ICICI Bank account uid/password(2 accounts with different uid/pwds)
3. Citibank account uid/password
4. SBT account uid/password
5. SBI account uid/password
6. ICICI Direct account uid/password
7. ICICI credit card account uid/password
8. BSNL online bill pay uid/pwd
9. ICICI Prudential account uid/password
10. LIC account uid/password
11. MoneyCenter account uid/password
That makes it 20, at the first glance. But it gets even tougher. Remember that for each of these bank accounts, we need to remember their ATM card pins. That makes it +7. Besides, some banks have the concept of separate account and transaction passwords - ICICI is one. So, that makes it 29. This number still isn't a complete one. Because, at work, we will need uid/pwds to various systems such as databases and servers. But thankfully, we can write them down. Still, they keep changing, and we have to keep track of them.
I have mentioned this problem of mine to a lot of people. Amazingly, most of them don't find this to be that much of a problem. Some suggest me that I should use a single password, or a couple of passwords and toggle between them. Some others suggest that I keep a single string fixed and append another string which is a variable one. To me, I have tried both and failed in the long term. The problem is that, some sites ask have their own password policy - that the password should be changed once in every few weeks. This has caused a lot of trouble to me, as you won't try to change all the other passwords. Finally, it becomes a giant password chaos.
In order to solve this, I created a Yodlee MoneyCenter account. I was hoping that this will help me remember my uid/pwds. But I ended up having an extra uid/pwd. Now, I really am out of options. I have already forgotten the passwords of my yahoo, SBI, SBT and credit card accounts.
I really want all the systems to have bio-metric identification facility. I want to use my finger prints, my voice pattern and my eye pattern to be able to do the entire authentication for me. But when is that going to happen? Till then, it's hard time.
P.S. : In the last post, I had blamed the commies for all that is wrong. Mrs. CPM (or should I call her the true representative of the working class!!) told us in a TV show that "The Left has done all the good things that the UPA government did and all the bad things were done by Congress". Yeah, right. Atleast you should take the blame for the fact that you have driven industry out of Kerala, and that her jobless people are here in Bangalore trying to steal my cell phone.
