Monday, July 7, 2008

Passwords, Emails, and Websites, oh my!

I've got a lot of passwords.

Lotsa.

I've passwords for work ('bout a metric ass ton), home pc, laptop, and oodles of websites. There's the bank, emails (lotsa), forums, and a few miscellaneous sites here and there...

My passwords are usually quite complex, the most basic of which are only numbers and letters... and less than 10 digits (big 'uns have symbols, caps, hand-signals, and chicken noises). The majority of 'em, if you ask what they are, I have to tippity-tappity on a keyboard - it's more muscle memory than memory-memory. Yeah, changing of passwords can get rather... interesting, at times.

I also have a bit of time on my hands when others might be doing other stuff... like sleeping - you know, inconsequential stuff.

So recently I was goofing around the net, and decided to google myself. This can get kind of fun considering that I can sometimes pick out what time in my life I knew someone by what name they refer to me by. I've got a rather long birth name, a not terribly common nickname, (and did I mention I have two last names, sometime hyphenated, sometimes not?), and have been known to go by several variations of names, both military and civilian. Heck, I respond to flying objects and muttered curses, at times.


Then there's my emails.

I have way less emails than passwords, that's for darn sure, but there've still been plenty of those. I've had work mails, personal mails, email addys for when I was a student, and emails that are loosely assigned a purpose. To explain, I've had some that're basically for friends & family, and those that are more disposable, for ordering stuff from amazon, cdnn, and the like.

Back to the googling, I noticed a number of stuff that had popped up for others with my name.

Guess my particular label isn't as rare as it once was, I guess.

Scrolling down and at about the second page or so, I saw something interesting. It was a profile on one of those myspace-esq sites, where you can meet up with old buddies from school or whatever. Huh, seems this particular guy with my name was a Marine, too.

Imagine that.

Huh, guy served at the same time as me... in the same unit...

*sigh*

So I had two friends on this site that I had completely forgotten about, the site's host, and an old college buddy.

I tried to login. "Error. Login user name not recognized."

Hmm, must've been another password... or email.

"Error. Login user name not recognised."

Thus ensued the longest session of email addresses and password combinations, ever.

No luck, and I tried about every combination of known emails and passwords, nothing worked.

Considering the time when I apparently set it up, I must've had a different email addy and a long since forgotten password.

Heck, I even set up another account, to see if I could find my other email address and use that to jog the ole memory, and that's when I figured out it was almost definitely an old email addy.

So, now I have two accounts set up for this website that I'm probably not ever gonna use...

Heh, I even tried emailing myself, from the new account to the old. I thought that perhaps seeing the 'To' part might jog my memory. As I was doing this, I thought about why I would set up an account and then never use it. My question was answered when I tried to send an email, view an account, or click on just about anything, 'cause they all had the same result - a pop up box soliciting for an upgrade to the account, one of those $5 per month, or $30 for the year. There was no, 'screw that, I'm a cheap bastid and just wanna use the cheapie-cheapie version'. There was no passing that upgrade pop-up neither, apparently.

That about explains it...

When I went to delete at least the new account, guess what message I got? Yup, another request to upgrade and a friggin' phone number to call to delete the account. Nice.


So, C., pretty sure you read this every once in a while, lame excuse as it might be, it's my story and I'm stickin' to it.


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