I just spent the better part of the afternoon paying bills, synching my cell phone, updating my “profiles” and working with social media – including e-mail. What do all these things have in common? Aside from the obvious – I spent the afternoon staring at a computer screen getting a stiff neck – they all require passwords and “user-id” codes of some kind. For a long time, I had one “main” password that I used for everything. But my daughter brought me up short with that – warning that I was jeopardizing my online world…So  I started mixing it up – changing my way of working online.

Now for the post-menopausal mind, this is a challenging way to spend the afternoon. Thinking…did I put a capital letter for this one? Does this one have a symbol (!+, or *)? What family member (human or feline) did I use for this one? Did I include a number (birth year) or not? Truly my mind has not gone through so many mental gymnastics since I stopped playing chess and backgammon (for lack of time not lack of enjoyment).

Yet, despite making these changes, several articles I’ve read lead me to believe I am still not doing it right – that is creating the strongest passwords possible. They indicate you should use words that are not in the dictionary (but then are these really words?), mix up characters and upper and lower case letters, and don’t use familiar names. Clearly, these rules were invented by those under 40…

The bottom line is if I do this, I will need a cheat sheet of all my passwords for sure – and one that I change every two to three months if I am to believe the experts. Of course, that (creating a cheat sheet) is frowned upon too…(I swear I’ll only make one copy and I will be prepared to swallow it whole if threatened…) And even if I do attempt to set up a new version of some secret password code every couple of months that would make any military code pale in its wake, after putting in so much time and effort, do any of these things do any good? I kept reading…

Interestingly, one article gave good information on how to construct a strong, easy-to-remember password base then suggested the examples given in the article were not very strong. Huh! Several others discussed the main issue surrounding solid passwords – the prevention of identity theft. The problem is that the main cause of identity theft is when major databases belonging to such institutions as banks, credit cards, stores, etc. are hacked into and data is stolen. So – the bottom line appears to be I can spend hours creating master codes that use fake words and symbols I’ll never remember in a million years, then go to the grocery store, swipe my debit card, and still have all my information hacked.  Personally, I think I’d rather stick with my old standby password and spend time getting mental gymnastics playing chess or backgammon….