I’m so pleased to have my friend, and funny lady, Joan Oliver Emmer as a guest blogger today! Joan’s website, Body of Work is definitely one of my favorites. Enjoy her love / hate relationship with logins on my site, then I’d be tickled if you use the link above to come over to her site and get my take on Groundhog Day. Enjoy!

It has taken me nearly eight months of applying for unemployment insurance online to be able to remember the four digit code that I must pair with my social security number to collect benefits. It’s not a complicated series of numbers, but it’s one of approximately 127 passwords and codes that I need to remember every day in order to be able to manage my online life. Which is essentially the totality of my life these days.

Each day I wake up and pray that I will remember my passwords. It would make sense, I tell myself EVERY SINGLE DAY as I struggle with messages that lock me out of my online bank accounts, Facebook, and access to my medical benefits (how will I ever treat that dowager’s hump?), to write down all of my passwords. I tried this once, but as you might have guessed –ba da bump! – I couldn’t remember where I left the little notebook in which I jotted down my passwords. Or why I was even looking for it.

It’s a good thing that prospective employers don’t know that I can’t remember a series of four simple, consecutive, even numbers. It would confirm their suspicions that there are younger models out there who don’t need to run to the ladies room every 15 minutes or jack up their insurance costs with fun stuff like endoscopies and hernia repair operations.

I am taking a social work course for which the entire class had to meet last Thursday evening to watch a two hour film. The median age of students in the social work program is 37 –not young by the standards of most post-secondary courses of study, but way younger than I am. This morning (Monday), the professor emailed us a follow-up assignment to complete, asking us to reiterate the main points of the film, the director’s point of view and the overall takeaway. Only four days later and I couldn’t remember anything about the film. And it’s not like I can look up the synopsis of a film called “Race – the Power of an Illusion” on Rottentomatoes.com

My husband has a very cool option on his own computer, one which I would love to have for every online site I access. Rather than inputting a password, he has the option of “swiping an enrolled finger.”

I don’t know how you “enroll a finger” or whether “swiping” one can get you thrown in jail, but laughing at this term is enough to make me forget all my troubles – and all of my remaining passwords – every time.