Seniors, rebel, we have a whole lifetime of experiences to remember; and now we are expected to not only name but remember a class of passwords that a computer genius cannot break. Shish!

Passwords for your bank account, passwords for your email account, for your web pages and blogs, passwords for the ATM and Amazon: we aren't boomers, we are the password-mad-generation.

We are supposed to name our passwords with complex strings of gibberish, numbers and letters, and not the word mom? Unbelievable. Some years ago the most prestigious universities always included at least one user who logged on with the word mom. How do I know?

In the 1980s, when bulletin boards were king, and later when AOL was high tech and popular, a computer guru told me that it was easy to break into both government and educational sites simply by finding the weakest point in the system, and there always was one he said whose password was MOM. How did he know? Beats me.

Now, there's been a lot of water under that dam, since the innocent era of Windows 95 computing like credit card theft, government sites dangerously compromised, banks robbed virtually, viruses let loose in the wild, and in general harmless hoodwinks.

Mom isn't as popular as a password any more, but high on the lazy list for 2K are let-me-in and 123456. Look familiar? If so, should you feel guilty if these are your passwords?

Don't feel guilty says an article by Randall Stross titled Goodbye Passwords, You Aren't a Good Defense in the NYTimes. Stross says there are many ways to get around a password typed into a web page whether it's strong or weak. He says an information card is in our future that will encrypt a password for us, one we don't have to ever know or remember; it will enter a hard to crack code that stymies the smartest thieves.

Until then, and he didn't say when this would happen, many of us type in the currently oft-used phrase and sequence, 123456 and let-me-in, which seems at least an improvement of three letters in ten years over the password mom.

For now, we haul around six or so passwords per person in our brains, which we mostly download to post it notes that flap around and draw attention in bright yellows and pinks, decorating our computer monitors as a fan blows across our desk cooling us off this summer, or at least this is so at my desk.

How do we cope? Well, denial works for my family. They set an easy password and feel protected; after all it won't happen to them. Yet, it did. My son-in-law received letters from the bank and law enforcement, seems someone assumed his identity, they lived someplace else and wrote checks that my son-in-law hadn't written. He was lucky. He came out nearly without a scratch, and he lived cautiously ever after rather than happily in our new digital wild, wild west.

Denial cannot be overestimated as a coping strategy, I use it often. Set an easy password and forget it? Probably not, just as a good lock or an adequate fence keeps a snarky neighbor honest, you might set a decently complex password just as you would install a decent lock; it will not stop the malcontent bent on profiting from your bank accounts, you need help from the bank for that, but it might stop beginners at the door to your email and other accounts, as well as help some with the smarter visitor to your virtual reality-your bank and credit cards.

After all it's a big world out there with too many bank accounts to pick off and too little time. Ripe berries are picked first so make your accounts just a little greener, harder to compromise with a complex password that is a better choice than mom or let-me-in. And, those post it notes, hide them.

shirley.publish@gmail.com