I lost my password...

“I lost my password, please help.”

The message sat on my phone, glowing in the darkness, mocking the deep sleep it had just woke me from.

And all I could do was laugh.

A picture popped up in my mind of the Irish maid in Mary Poppins, “Dear, dear! I’ve lost me password! What’ll the Master say?!”

Then, what does a password look like? If I’m going to find a lost password, I should know what it looks like. Perhaps, as it is a computer thing, it looks like Sultan, the footstool from Beauty and the Beast – a kind of ottoman with legs and a tassel tail running around in circles. I can imagine walking through the hospital, peering under gurneys and curtains, looking for a little wagging tassel.

Perhaps it is more like the functions in Donald in Mathmagic Land small trains of letters and numbers that crawl around on the surfaces like a centipede. This would be harder to find as I imagine it to be silent and with the ability to blend into the shadows.

Or perhaps it was lost like those socks that enter a space-time continuum inside the dryer. If that is where/how she lost her password there is no hope. At least I can never find that second sock once it disappears.

Finally, I thought, maybe it’s like the lost pet with all those posters in the neighborhood with a photo and the desperate pleas of the owner sometimes with a reward offer. You never know how that turns out, the posters just eventually disintegrate.

​In the end, there was only one thing for me to do. Go to the big password-mill, despite all my misgivings about how the big operators run these massive for-profit enterprises where the passwords are emotionally and physically abused. At least I knew there would be a replacement password there.