How personal are your passwords?

I MISS some things about big offices: The “paper jam in Zone D”, the colleague with the permanent sniffle, the awkward conversation with the boss when we both happen to be in the toilet at the same time.

One thing I don’t miss is the error message that pops up on the computer screen: “This file is locked by another user BSMITH. Do you want to open a read-only copy?”

I look at BSMITH’s desk and he has gone home. In fact BSMITH — not his real username — waltzed out of the office and now has his out-of-office reply on and it’s telling everyone to contact me.

BSMITH is a little grouchy at being rung an hour after his holiday starts. I don’t apologise as the resentment at reading someone else’s out-of-office reply is still bubbling away. BSMITH is unwilling to share his password at first: “Can’t you just use the version on the server?”

“No, that’s an old version. You must not have saved before you left.”

A pause. “Em, OK it’s smithmachineluvsemmahunbun.”

They say you should keep your password memorable and personal, but there have been times when manly men have had to reveal it to me for business reasons. We’ve never been able to look each other in the eye since.

I don’t blame them for luvvy duvvy ones. With so many passwords to remember, each one has to be noteworthy. You can’t use the same one for every site. I’m not saying that I do but I am worried that somewhere on the internet I’ve signed up for a newsletter and my password is protected by the cyber-equivalent of a snoozing security guard. And if the hackers lift that password from his bunch of keys, it will set off a chain of identity theft so complete that the Colm O’Regan writing next week’s article will be a 59-year-old Venezuelan woman.

I checked on password-testing websites and apparently it would take an ordinary computer 44 billion years to guess mine. This was comforting until I read some of these password-testing sites might actually be hackers trying to steal your password. Does the world have to be so cruel? If you forget your password there are backup mechanisms to identify you, such as ‘answering your secret question’. The trouble with these is each one triggers reminiscences. What was your first car? “Ah the old Nissan Micra. A GREAT YOKE. FIERCE light on petrol.”

Or the site may force you to use a ‘captcha’, one of those pictures containing words you have to write to prove you’re human even though trying to decipher them will cause you to lose a little bit of your humanity. Sometimes the word is obscured by swiggles as if a deranged mastermind thinks he sees the devil in it. Other times it’s a blurry photo of a number on the door of an eerie-looking clapboard house that looks like it might have been a crimescene.

With bugs such as the Heartbleed threatening to take my password from me, I’m always on the lookout for good new ones because my old ones have just been *****.