Mar 9, 2018 3 min read

Sometimes I reminisce about the Daisy years.

Daisy was our part-dachshund-part-corgi pet, a little red girl who was afraid of our kids and her own shadow, but who had the softest ears and was so cuddly.

I miss her for those reasons, but I’m pining for those days now because “Daisy” was my password for everything. Everything was so much easier back then, when all you needed to do your work was a computer and a dog.

This was in the early days of the internet, when we were less likely to be hacked or scammed, and passwords could be just a word. When I first signed on to my email server, the screen asked me to think of a password and, probably like most people, I entered the name of my dog. “Daisy” became my password, my entree to e-mail, banking, credit cards – everything.

Maybe she was good luck, because I never was hacked.

In the 20 years since then, I’ve changed passwords dozens of times, right along with the requirements for choosing them. No longer will the internet accept one word. Now, they are asking for a tricky combination of letters both lower and upper case, numbers, and “special symbols.”

(We used to call “special symbols” punctuation marks, but that was before texting and social media, places indifferent to punctuation – and capital letters, for that matter.)

Since that day when I finally retired “Daisy” as my password, I’ve transitioned through dozens of new ones. I choose based on the things in my life I am not likely to forget. I’ve used versions of my home address, my children’s names, my favorite authors, and favorite foods – all scrambled and then combined with significant dates. If that sounds like a recipe for blanking out at the keyboard, you are right.

Is there anything as frustrating as resetting a password? First, you are asked to enter the existing password, and when you tell the screen you’ve forgotten it, you are spun off into a land of “secret answers” that you entered when you first signed up. Often, this is an inquiry about the color of my first car, something I will never forget because it was an awful car, and yellow. Only then are you cleared to enter a new password.

And that’s getting to be almost impossible. Having gone through all iterations of children’s names scrambled along with their scrambled birthdates; the word Pizza scrambled with old house addresses; and the names of current pets scrambled with my shoe size – I can no longer think of a password catchy enough to remember.

The university where I teach requires new passwords every few months. For a while there I got by with changing the “special symbol” and keeping the rest the same. But I’ve run out off symbols. I’ve also run out of favorite foods, house numbers, names of dogs and children, and important dates.

I long for the Daisy days. Navigating my online life was so much easier then. The other day I entered a new password for online banking. An hour later I tried to sign on and had already forgotten it.

I’m either going to have to take a different approach.

Or get another dog.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.