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I was recently the target of an internet heist. My identity was stolen. Well, I think so anyway. I had some suspicious interaction with both MySpace and Amazon, received a couple of emails with bogus links and just had that general "I smell something fishy" sense about the whole thing. So, okay. I took action. I fired back. I wasn't going to let mister (or miss, or missus, or mademoiselle, or senor, or whatEVA!) hacker steal MY life.

I spent a good portion of an afternoon changing my passwords to EVERYTHING. My online banking, facebook and myspace type accounts, amazon and ebay style stores, blogging and newspaper mumbo jumos... all of them had to be re-passworded. Phew. Quite the process. But I did it. I completed the entire thing and changed all my passwords. I felt great.

Then I went to access any number of the just-password-altered sites. BRICK WALL. I had forgotten the password. Of course, I wrote them all down. But the problem is that they were all so similar, and I used to have them all memorized. The email got password XYX for this reason, but the banks were password YXY because all I needed to remember was to invert and reverse the email password. This went on ad nauseam in my brain, of which we don't use enough (perhaps another post in the making?).

Long story short, I'm just now getting the hang of these new passwords.

You probably didn't care, did you?