Al Batt: Passwords always just want to be remembered

Published 8:45 pm Tuesday, May 13, 2025

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Tales from Exit 22 by Al Batt

If you find a quiet place, lean in and listen hard, you’ll hear a reverberating sound.

Al Batt

It’s produced by multitudes clicking on “Forgot your password?”

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A friend said, “I used to be able to remember all my passwords.”

He was a friend, so I didn’t reply, “That’s because you had no passwords to remember in your used-to-be days.”

He griped that each time he changed a password, he had to rename his dog.

What I told him was, “Unknit your brows. You’re not the only one.”

The genie in a magic lamp wanted to grant a man three wishes, but couldn’t because the surprised winner couldn’t remember the password.

Superman can’t remember his online password to the dry-cleaning company that picks up his dirty capes.

We’ve all boarded that struggle bus. None of us can remember all the things we need a password for, let alone what our passwords are. And those passwords couldn’t be extricated from our brains by the Jaws of Life. We don’t have a bigger thinking cap to put on (it’s in the shop), so we use password managers and biometric authentication to do our remembering for us.

I miss that hose that dinged when I drove over it and announced my presence at a full-service gas station. I suppose that could have been construed as a password of sorts.

I didn’t even need a password to use a gas station restroom that had been cleaned within the past year and required a key to gain entry. The key was chained to an anvil named Excalibur. If anyone could drag the anvil to the door, that person became the king of Iowa. That came as a shock to the newly crowned Mrs. Beulah Thompson, who immediately abdicated.

I once worked in a full-service gas station in a city that had way too many people. It was one of those jobs where I washed my hands and then needed to wash the bar of soap I’d used. It was there that this conversation with my boss might have taken place, “Did we clean the restroom during the last six months?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Was it cleaned during the six months prior to that?”

“I wasn’t working here then, so I’m not sure, but I doubt it.”

“Then put it on the calendar. We’ll need to make sure we clean it after the next six months go by.”

“Don’t remind me.”

No one ever scrawled any notation on the calendar. That wall hanging was over two years old.

I didn’t have any passwords when I was a boy. If I needed one, it would likely have been, “Open sesame,” which was a magical phrase popularized by the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, which opened the door to the robbers’ den. I tried it on a sesame-seed hamburger bun, but it didn’t open.

I wasn’t a member of The He-Man Woman-Haters Club, a neighborhood boys group founded by Spanky McFarland of the “Our Gang” or “Little Rascals” films. He’d founded the exclusive club (No gurlz allowed) as a defense against girls and Valentine’s Day. They had a clubhouse, even though Stymie had warned, “Wood doesn’t grow on trees.” Entry might have required a password.

I didn’t need a secret password to get into a speakeasy during the Prohibition era of 1920-1933.

The closest I had to a password was a locker combination that I usually forgot. I think it was “123.”

All my current passwords have at least 417 characters and include both uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, symbols, the name of the dog owned by my barber’s late aunt, an umlaut, a smiley face and the complete refrain from one of the Rolling Stones’ lesser-known songs. I want my passwords to be strong, secure and as unique as a snowflake.

A survey by NordPass found, on average, a single internet user has 168 passwords for personal use, and the most common passwords in descending order are 123456, 123456789, 12345678, password and qwerty123.

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a poor man to remember his elusive passwords.

There are things we’ll never forget.

Passwords aren’t one of those things.

Al Batt’s columns appear in the Tribune every Wednesday.