For the past twelve months of life, I have been struggling with the hassle of passwords. I have a user account that demands a monthly change of password, something that hasn’t been used in the past ‘x’ months. Security policy! I acknowledge the goodwill but that does not make me any less frustrated of remembering a mindless combination of alphanumeric, case specific and some special characters! Around that time, roughly an year ago, I came across an article that was a relief to all this distress!
Being in the same lines of password dilemma, the writer described how he came out of his chain smoking, and made up to his broken marriage, all with some random alphanumeric! And special characters. He started off with his password set as ‘QuitSmoking’ or something similar. And boom! He quit it..Exaggeration.. Level – Expert. That’s exactly what I thought. Then he went on saying, how he brought back the romance in life, controlled the temper, and finally made peace with the passwords! Of course I smirked and scoffed. And let it go. But the day came again, prompting for a new password. Scratching my head to find a pattern, I stumbled upon this write up once again. Giving it a shot, I chose an immediate life goal as my next password. Adding some pattern to the digits and the special characters did the trick. Twelve month down, and I still remember my password set last January. Not just easy to remember, these passwords did make an impact on my life.
Through the past year, I smiled bigger, talked less, and said ‘not later’ to kill my procrastination. I told myself to keep calm for a month, and when it didn’t work, I said to myself again, to keep calmer. I tuned my mind for a competitive exam, and reminded myself to not lose focus. All through these passwords. That’s one thing that I’m taking with me into 2017. ******** to life!
The Last Straw 