My spirit animal is a Manx Shearwater, and simplicity is why.
Sometime in the late summer, the Shearwater takes off from its west coast cliffs and hilltops, and flies clockwise around the Atlantic over the next eight months, basing itself for a few months off Argentina as it does so. It fishes as it goes, and occasionally sits on the water, thinking about nothing more complicated than pilchards. Then it comes back, raises a chick along with its other half, in a converted rabbit warren, and repeats the cycle for about 50 years until, with 5 million miles on the clock, it dies and goes up to the great guano heap in the sky.
There is nothing more complicated in its life than seeing off the odd Great Skua and skirting gingerly around tropical storms. And, whatever else it has to deal, it doesn’t live, as I do, a life defined by passwords.
And thus I found hell at Haslemere Station on Tuesday morning.
I had simply forgotten the pin number on my company credit card when I came to pay for my train to London. I have many numbers in my life and, in the pressure of running from the car park, my random access memory had wittily scrambled up the four digits into an irretrievable code which had 3,998 chances of being wrong, which happens to be 3995 more than Barclays give you before declining your card for evermore. Out it duly threw me. I paid with my personal debit card which, for all the wrong reasons, has a pin number connected with something odd a distant relative did once, and which therefore I can remember.
On calling Barclays when I got back, the polite robotic voice plied me with security questions before letting me loose on my designated Bangalore graduate, most of which I could do but one of which was my date of birth. Unfortunately, around the time I was issued with my card, people were suggesting you invented a date of birth for things like this, rather than putting down the easily traced real one, and so I had. Even more unfortunately, I hadn’t written it down. I knew I had only ever invented three of them and tried the first, April Fool’s Day 2000, and was duly thrown out of the system again.
The second tier security robot, as icily helpful as the first, wanted to know what my memorable name was, and hinted with the word ‘scruffy’. That was easy. It was one of my Jack Russells, Millie or Boris, as they are the scruffiest things in my life if you don’t count my next Prime Minister. Wrong again. I had had this card for so long that it dated back to my late, and even scruffier, Glen of Imaal Terrier, Paddy, so out I went again, and on the saga went until I finally spoke to a human and admitted my sins.
‘Are you OK now?’ he asked me when he had finished, like I had just had a fall in the Day Centre.
Until recently, I thought my policy on passwords was quite clever: a generic one for anything non-financial, and a bespoke one for the bank. Let’s say the generic one started as ‘Curlew’, because it did, and ‘Curlew’ was what I wrote down on my phone note book. Then Microsoft wanted numbers added, so it became ‘Curlew12’ but only on Microsoft. The the App Store wanted something that wasn’t a letter or a number, so it became ‘Curlew12%%’, only I did something wrong and had to change it to ‘Curlew34%%’. The tennis club combination lock followed, as did my Google Account, my Norton Malware password, Mail Chimp, Easyjet, Linkedin (as if anyone is going to give me a job at this stage), National Rail, iTunes, Justpark, Facebook, Cineworld, and even one for the LTA the year I tried to get tickets for Wimbledon.
If you were to mug me for my phone tomorrow, you would find that I have no less than 23 passwords for 17 things, ranging from ‘Curlew’ to ‘Beaver876£@’. Don’t ask me how they evolved, as they just did. For security reasons, I have made it even harder for myself by removing the middle bit of each password on my notebook and replacing it with a * so that ‘Curlew’ became C****w’, which was great until I used ‘Callow’ for something. And each time I mess it up, and you and I both know I didn’t really want to use the word ‘mess’ there, I have another code sent to my mobile phone that allows me to reset another equally unmemorable password that I will screw up the next time I check in to a plane, or put some more benighted software on my PC. ‘Simples’, as that irritating rodent says on the adverts.
And all I could think of in my long conversation with three robots and a human 4990 miles away was the man who once changed his name by deed-poll to ‘Mr Nationalwestminsterbankarefascistbastards’, when they declined him an overdraft, so that they had to put it on his cheque books.
I was born for gentler times.
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