The rise of the machines continues apace, and it behoves us, puny mortals that we are, to race into a mechanistic state to avoid being crushed under their metallic robo-feet. On a rare trip into the dragon’s den of R&D, June, our head of accounts, was talking to me of this syndrome of robotisation – namely how we all have to memorise vast chunks of numerical data. Credit cards, alarm codes, PIN and mobile numbers rattle around our heads until we’re practically thinking in binary.
Which is all well and good for those of us who have Derren Brown style mental powers – but as June pointed out, what happens when you’ve got a less-than-perfect memory? I think I can dredge up quite a few important numbers purely from memory, but I also remember fraught times at cashpoints when all the digits got mixed up and I ended up freezing my card, or setting off house alarms. Numbers – they’re just so abstract and hard to remember.
Of course there is an alternative, which we see all the time using computers – passwords. Every so often you hear statistics about the majority of passwords being ’secret’ or ‘password’. As is often the case with this blog, I’m starting to wonder what people’s passwords say about them. Sadly I can’t really conduct a poll of the office, all I can analyse are my own passwords. My policy is to go for phrases, words and collections of numbers completely unrelated in anything but the most tenuous way to myself and my interests…
… which kind of makes them abstract and hard to remember. Perhaps I should swallow my Orwellian terror of ID cards and biometric scanning and just relax in the knowledge that soon my fingerprints will get me into my house OK. Unless, of course, a Terminator turns up and steals my fingers.
The other issue in the world of ever increasing numbers of passwords is:
1- Do you make life more difficult for yourself by using different words, phrases or collections of “random” 4 digits for each password that you have to remember, or
2 – Do you make life simpler and keep them the same?
The first method increases the liklihood of getting frozen out of your own account by having a mental abhorration at the cash point machine whilst the second increases the chance of any would-be fraudster to steal your identity in one foul swoop.