What I did on my second day was to get locked out of my blog. My randomly generated password was too random and I kept getting it wrong, so I tried to reset it, but the link email got into spam for an unfathomable reason, and I fuzzily looked for spam mail in my junk mail thinking they were both the same. Finally I gave up and sent out a cry for help. So here I am, ready to post again.
Talking of passwords, R. always tries to play safe by using the same password for every site. I rage at him for being naive, but he will not think beyond a telephone number or a house number. Getting him to use a combination of familiar data is progress of sorts. He even thought once upon a time when he was being asked to register with an email id and a password that he was being asked for his email password. I hope he has outgrown that.
But it is no use blaming him. Our bank manager last month gave us the sage advice to change the officially-issued PIN of our bank card for reasons of safety and his advice was to change it to something that we would not forget easily – like our birthdays?!
Time was when I used to remember telephone numbers by the score and bank account numbers when they were only four-digit long. But now phone numbers can be accessed only on the mobile phone and bank account numbers are too long and too many to be memorized. There was the day we had gone to D’s office to pick her up and the phone had been left behind at home. Neither of us could remember her number as we stood in the fancy lobby and wondered how to contact her as everybody in the reception had left. Finally we told the security guard that we were D’s parents and he said he knew her name and the department where she worked and was able to call her for us.
We also have bank cards that we don’t use frequently. Writing down the PIN is inviting trouble, so we try to use a combination of mnemonics and guesswork when we do need to use them, getting it wrong as often as not. R. frequently forgets his login passwords for important sites and turns to me for help. That is how we happened to meet the bank manager, asking for new PIN numbers for our old cards. Perhaps he was only trying to be helpful, so that we wouldn’t forget again.
But, seriously, a bank manager? But, wait, a public sector one. Maybe.
When it comes to technology, the moral of the story is that you first have to figure out how it is supposed to work, and then if it seems like hasn’t, you look harder and harder until you figure it out. 🙂 When you told me the password reset link was not showing up in your email, I obviously knew I had set up the MX records perfectly fine (remember the test email I had sent you) and I knew I had updated the administrative email in the blog settings, so the only explanation available was that the email had gone into your spam.
“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? –Sherlock Holmes
By the way, resetting the password via email all the time is actually a pretty reasonable security measure in cases where you don’t visit the site often. You simply pick a long and hard random password, and use it exactly one time. The next time, you simply ask for a reset and pick a new password of the same kind…
Good for you I am famous 😉
Oh, D, he was delighted to help, you seemed to be very popular 🙂