When I started college in 1995, something called “electronic mail” was very new to me (and most of the world). The university gave me an email account, and if I had the patience to wait for the dial-up modem to connect, I could use the all-text interface to write to the small handful of people I knew who would look at their own email accounts sometime in the next week. A whole lot has changed since then, obviously, when it comes to the ease and frequency of email. Another aspect of that world has also changed dramatically: passwords.
I remember getting an email account for my job on campus two years later and having to choose a password. I was told that my password could be anything except two things: the same as my login, and the word “password.” I’d actually thought of doing the latter, but I guess that was a much less original idea than I’d anticipated. At the time, I knew I was about to be working 20-30 hours a week while also having a full course load, so I made my password a reminder for myself: “sanity.”
I thought of this recently because I had to set up a user name and password for a company that I occasionally work with. There were four guidelines for creating my password. It must:
1. Be at least 8 characters
2. Have at least one number
3. Have at least one capital letter
4. Have at least one symbol
I was stumped. In the past, I’ve added a number here or there to my standard passwords to make them unique (especially for those associated with bank accounts), but I didn’t even know where to start with this. My old “sanity” password from the days before major hacking and identity theft would’ve failed on all four counts. The only thing I had going for me was that I’d only be using this specific password for a month or two while working on a particular project, so I wouldn’t be living with this decision for any length of time. That said, it was still pretty daunting. I ended up using a short word with some capitals, the number 4 to stand for “for,” my client’s initials, and then an exclamation mark so it sounds like an exciting sentence. I wasn’t thrilled with it, but it fit the bill and at least made me smile every time I typed it in.
In hindsight, I could’ve gotten really creative by using the letters of the numbers or symbols. For example, using a 1 where the letters “o-n-e” would normally appear could’ve been cool (like in “b1r,” naturally). Or maybe an ampersand for the letters “a-n-d” could’ve worked. Let me know if you think of any good ones, as I’ll probably have to do this on another project sometime soon. So pay “At10tion!”