I’ve Survived 29 Brain Operations, But a Password Reset May Finish Me Off

I have survived 29 brain operations. I have recovered from things that would cause most people to lie flat on the floor and refuse to participate in life ever again. Yet this week, I was nearly defeated by a password box.

Apparently, the password I have used successfully for months is suddenly wrong. It isn’t wrong. I know it isn’t wrong because I wrote it down after being told repeatedly that writing passwords down is dangerous. What is apparently less dangerous is allowing a website to lock me out of something I own while insisting that I prove I am not a robot by identifying seventeen microscopic traffic lights.

I requested a password reset. The website told me it had sent an email. It had not. I requested another. Still nothing. Five minutes later, both arrived together, but the first link had expired and the second apparently belonged to a different moment in the space-time continuum.

Then came the security code.

“Enter the six-digit code we sent to your phone.”

Fine. I left the website to check my messages. When I returned, the website had refreshed and wanted me to log in again. I logged in again. It sent another code. I left to find that one. When I came back, it refreshed again. This is not security. This is psychological warfare.

Modern life is full of tiny inconveniences that are supposedly making everything easier. Restaurants make us scan a QR code to read a menu, then the menu wants our email address, mobile number and date of birth before it will reveal the price of a chicken schnitzel. Car parks no longer accept coins. Banks no longer have branches. Businesses no longer have telephone numbers. If you do find one, a recorded voice says your call is important while leaving you on hold long enough to reconsider whether the matter—or indeed life itself—is worth pursuing.

Nothing simply works anymore. Everything needs an account, an app, an update, a verification code and permission to track your location. I recently attempted to perform one small task online and ended up with twelve browser tabs open, three confirmation emails and no memory of what I had originally intended to do.

And heaven help you if you click “Forgot password.” The website will demand a new password containing a capital letter, a lowercase letter, a number, a symbol, an ancient rune and the blood type of your first pet. You carefully create one, only to be told that your new password cannot be the same as an old password.

Which means it knew the old password all along.

I suspect we are no longer angry because life is particularly terrible. We are angry because we spend every day being pecked to death by digital ducks. One minor annoyance would be manageable. Fifty of them before lunch turns a reasonable adult into someone screaming, “I AM NOT A ROBOT!” at a photograph of a pedestrian crossing.

Technology was supposed to give us more leisure time. Instead, we now spend that leisure time updating technology, charging technology, searching for technology and asking technology why it can’t connect to the other technology sitting three centimetres away.

I’m not against progress. I would just like progress to remember the original arrangement: it was meant to work for us.

Because after everything I have survived, I refuse to be taken out by a little red message saying, “Something went wrong. Please try again later.”

Something did go wrong.

We invented the internet.