The Password Jungle

Remember back in the days when your game boxes would take up half your shelf space? While opening the box of a game you have been waiting for is a special feeling, I am glad that most of my games are now digital downloads as it saves space and is convenient when you are traveling a lot like I am.

Remember when you had to queue for hours in the bank to get your bills paid? I do a monthly celebatory dance when I log in to my netbank and sort it all out in 10 minutes.
In short, I love that a lot of things has conveniently moved to the Internet and can be sorted, dowloaded or organized with a couple of clicks of the mouse.

However, with the ease of access comes another issue that I know my grandmother for instance never had to deal with; Passwords! Almost everything on the Internet requires you to use passwords and quite frankly it has come to a point for me where it is getting a bit ridicolous.

I have passwords for Internet banking, for emails, for taxes, for forums, for this blog. I even have a password to log into my computer, in fact I have 2; one for my home computer and one for my work computer.

And then there are the passwords for all my gaming, I have a battlenet account password, a Steam password, an Origin password and a SOE password. I have passwords for Guild Wars 2, for Tera, for Minecraft, for my Neopets account (although I can not remember this one), for Path of Exiles etc. etc. etc.

Then there are of course passwords for Reddit, Flickr, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Pinterest and a variety of other social media sites.
In short, I have passwords coming out my ears and of course as someone who knows a lot about Internet security and who has seen my fair share of unfortunate people getting their accounts and emails compromised, I do follow all the rules to keep my data safe. This means not using the same password for multiple sites or accounts and changing my passwords on a regular basis.

This of course causes a new issue. My boyfriend despairs every time I have to log in to one of my accounts, that I haven't used for a bit, as he knows the scenario that will play out:

First I will confidently enter my username and password. Then I will stare in amazement when I am informed that either the username or password is incorrect. I will then mumble something about being certain that it is the right one and retype it. After having repeated this a couple of times I will start getting flustered and maniacally enter one of the 13611 different password and username combinations I have. After approximately 15 minutes I will red in the head, sweating and enraged give up and click the lifesaving "have you forgotten your password button" and reset my password to something completely new. Repeating the password to myself again and again, I will swear that I will never forget this particular login again.... which usually lasts as long as until next time I need it.

And I am not alone. In fact the more we go online the bigger the problem gets and lets be honest with ourselves, there are only so much capacity in our brains for remembering random strings of numbers, symbols and letters. The problem is so big that when searching for "Tools to remember passwords" Google returns 217,000,000 search results of sites providing free or paid for programs that can help you with the task.

We might have freed up a lot of space and spare time by bringing everything online, but it comes at the cost of filling our poor heads with columns of passwords. Bring on memory chips or implement fingerprint/retina scans as a standard login method for all our online adventures I say!

Do you have issues remembering all your passwords as well? Or have you found a magical solution for the issue?