Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

It's Only Common Sense: Take My Life, Please

Editor's Note: To listen to Dan's weekly column, as you've always done in the past, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...The other night we decided it was time to watch a good old-fashioned Christmas movie. Being all snowed in and snuggly in front of the fireplace, we did not want to venture to another part of the house where our DVDs are kept. We decided instead to hit our Apple TV and see what it had to offer. Actually, we wanted to see "Christmas with the Kranks." I'll admit it, that’s my guilty pleasure holiday movie. But we couldn’t find it on Netflix so we went to Apple instead. That’s when the problems started. First, Apple TV wanted a password and for some reason it didn’t like the original password (something about it not being secure enough), so it wanted a new one. We came up with a new password--something obviously stupid enough for me to remember, yet secure enough to satisfy the security police at Apple. Good. Now we could settle in and watch Tim the Tool Man and Jamie Lee the yogurt pusher indulge in their hilarity. But, no, not yet said the Apple security gods. Now it wanted our “security code” before it would process our big $2.99 payment for the movie. It took us a while to figure out what they wanted, since we were trying to watch TV and not book an airline ticket. Finally, we figured out that they wanted the three little numbers on the card that we used to set up the Apple account three years ago! Who knew what card that was or where the heck it was? Three years ago…really? So, that was it: They won. We surrendered, gave up, and ended up switching to a channel that was showing “A Christmas Story” for the 8 millionth time.

That’s when I decided to give up. I'm done with passwords. I just don’t care anymore; take anything you want from me. It’s just not worth it. If you want to sneak into my house and steal $2.99 movies from my Apple account, do it! If you want to go to my audible account and steal a book, then be my guest--have a ball, read a book for a change. It will be good for you. Hell, if you want to go into my bank account and raid that, good luck, I can’t even figure out how to get money of there, and I have the password.

What is it with these passwords anyway? They're getting more and more complicated, with caps and numbers; I saw one the other day that needed dashes and semicolons and other forms of punctuation marks so that my account would be secure…and this was the account I have so that I can buy useless stuff like a chrome-covered shift knob for my Wrangler. Really? The account has to be that secure? Someone might go into that account and buy a new Jeep hat on my dime, I guess.

Where is all of this going? When is it going to stop? When will it all end? And the worst part of this is that the crazier the demands for more and more esoteric passwords the more we find out that people are getting into our cyber shorts at will. Last year, someone got into our local TD Bank accounts and got all of their customers’ e-mails and passwords. A few months ago, our local supermarket chain was hacked and they got all of our e-mails and passwords. And do we really want to talk about our own U.S. government and what those guys are doing to U.S. citizens, never mind poor Angela Merkel?

It makes me wonder why I’m killing myself racking my brain trying out another weird variation of using my birthdate for a password while these huge institutions aren’t even safe. It makes me wonder what they are using for a password for their accounts--maybe they need to have the Apple password police help them with their passwords?

Take my life… please take it all. I don’t care anymore. I give up--I do not want to spend another minute thinking of new, more secure password that will have to have lower and upper case as well as numbers and, oh yes, various and sundry punctuation marks. Just take it, take it all, I surrender…take my life, please. It’s only common sense.