Password Perplexity

Yesterday morning I decided that it was about time to change my email password. It had been the same for quite sometime, and a very wise friend said that I should change these things more often for safety. Now this wasn’t just any email address, it was the email address for our music quartet, Whispering Roses, and it also accessed our website control panel. I found the place to change it without too much trouble, entered my new password then logged out and tried to log back in. Error message. Either the email or password was incorrect. Puzzled, I tried again, and again. I tried the old password, but nothing worked. So I clicked on the “forgot my password” button. I entered my country, state and zip code and then I came to my secret question: Who is your favorite historical person?

What? A single favorite historical person? I have far to many! Could it be William Wallace, Robert Bruce or Eric Liddell? What on earth made me choose that question? And I knew I didn’t have the answer written down. I began trying names, but there were far to many combinations. It could be William Wallace, william wallace, williamwallace or just plain Wallace. And maybe I didn’t even choose an actual historic person at all. Vague memories of choosing our favorite person with my sisters came flooding back; hadn’t we talked about using Aragorn or Frodo? I tried so many different combinations that I triggered the lock so I couldn’t try anymore.

Okay, so now I had to try a different way. If I had provided them with another email address while I still knew my password I could have had them send a reset link there. Scratch. If I had assigned another one of our emails as administrator, I could have reset it there. Scratch. If I had used the automatic computer password remembering part of my sign-in, I could have reset it with that. Scratch.

By now it was afternoon and I finally decided to email support from my email. They were guaranteed to reply in four hours, though in the past it had taken them longer. Oh joy of joys, they could reset it if I verified the billing information! Four hours later I finally re-reset my password, went to sign in and, oops, it was still locked. Supposedly a spammer might be trying to access my account – ahem, that was me. This time, support replied within an hour, and I opened my inbox to ten new messages. Thankfully, none of them had been important and I hadn’t lost any jobs over this. It is amazing how much we depend on electronic communication these days. Oh the relief knowing I could read my emails again!

Oh yes, and I changed my secret question.

By the way, if any of you have been contemplating trying to hack our blogger account, we have a new super secure password for it too.

~ Janna