User Password Energy

Oh boy.  How many user passwords on average does one person have?  Between banking institutions, social media pages, e-mail accounts, children logins for their academic record and school lunch account, the many reward cards, online stores, the phone voicemail systems, stuff related to the job and/or business, prospective employer career and job search sites, TV shows…  

Thought I had it down to a science by creating an exhaustive spreadsheet for all user names and passwords (albeit the passwords on the spreadsheet are still yet encrypted and should prove to be a Bigfoot to decipher).

Been doing that practice for almost a decade now.  Started when 12345a could not be used anymore because it didn’t have an uppercase letter and some other kind of character like an exclamation point.  Then it was hard to keep up with the new passwords that had to be created because the old passwords “expired” every 20 minutes.

Well, one practice that fell by the wayside was keeping up with the new passwords.  The almighty “Reset Password” button became a nifty tool and quick fix to get in whatever site or account due to laziness to pull up the spreadsheet.  Didn’t give it one thought that the ‘just get another one’ method would work only for as long as access to the e-mail accounts remained to eternity.

Had been a long time e-mail account holder with one company.  Hadn’t posted in a blog outside of the website in almost a year.  Totally forgot about it. (shrugged shoulders)  When the decision came to return to Blogger, stumbled on the old blog page after the new blog page was created.

And of course...can’t get into it.  The old blog account was created using another e-mail account and no phone number or alternate e-mail address was given for password recovery.  Ugh.  It’s just sitting there untilled with a link error that can’t be fixed.*

But that’s okay. 2013 is too precious to spend excess energy on a simple mistake. The lesson has been well learned. 

Note to self:  Keep list of user login and associated passwords current at all times.

*Already been in communication with account recovery.  Ain’t worth the carousel ride.