Passwords

For ease in shopping, nothing beats the internet. In recent months, shopping online saved me what would have been hours of zipping around to different stores to find random items I wanted or needed, including: a particular brand of non-toxic sunscreen, a specific-sized watch battery, an out-of-print book on apparel design, and some hard-to-find sewing notions. Plus, I like to buy used items when I can, and there are more and more places to online these days to connect with that special someone somewhere in the country who wants to get rid of exactly the thing I want to own.

Of course, for every website I use for shopping, banking, paying bills, reserving library books, checking email and sometimes just accessing information, I have to create an account with a username and password.

This makes me crazy.

It makes me crazy in part because creating an account usually means I’m about to get placed on a mailing list (though I’ve become an expert at unchecking the little “receive periodic specials / announcements / newsletters / trumpet fanfares / spam from us” boxes). But mostly it makes me crazy because I’m faced with this dilemma: do I re-use the username and password I most commonly use because it’s the one I’m most likely to remember, or do I make up a new one in order to fool any would-be thieves who try to break into my accounts?

The prospect of this dilemma is enough to cause me, more frequently than I’d like to admit, to abandon whatever enterprise I was undertaking. I just can’t be bothered to choose new passwords for everything I do online.

Recently I was logging into some account or other – perhaps online, or maybe banking by phone – and, for extra security, I was asked to enter the last four digits of my social security number. That day, this extra request caused in me the same feeling I get when prompted to create a new account to complete a mundane transaction – like it was this huge hassle, such an imposition on my time. (My life is so hard.)

Of course, other than moments like that one I don’t think much about my SSN (or other passwords, for that matter).  They’re just keys to open doors or hoops to jump through to get what I need. Minor irritations in my otherwise pretty charmed life.

Not long ago, I was at a seminar on the challenges faced by undocumented immigrants in the United States. A person who spoke at the event talked about the overwhelming stress and anxiety experienced by people living in this country who don’t have an SSN. For so many, especially those who were raised in the United States and who know no other life than this one and are looking for employment or hoping to go to college, the SSN is a password to everything. 

I got that password for one reason only: accident of birth. I was born here, and not somewhere else.

I still think the proliferation of accounts and usernames and passwords is irritating, and they continue to be a source of frustration for me.

But these days I’m trying – without being burdened by guilt and apart from what I believe about the critical need for real immigration reform – to absorb and contemplate the reality of the unfairness of a world that (through no merit of my own) granted me a password to my life.