You need to change your code. Yesterday.

Passcodes. I hate them.

There I said it.  Remembering a dozen different passcodes is something that my aging mind doesn’t like to do. Keeping up with the ever-changing ones is next to impossible. I know, I sound like my grandfathers, but so be it.  I’ve got a passcode for the bank. For the insurance company. For the car alarm. The home alarm, the savings and loan, the stock broker, the ATM, the motorcycle maintenance manual.  Hell, I’ve got a passcode for the damn refrigerator water filter order system.

Then the other day, my bank made me change mine. Made me do it; They wrote a note that said, it is time to change your passcode.  (You should know that by their own measure my passcode was in the upper 90 percentile of effectiveness. The one they assigned me was only at 50 percentile secure rating.  I immediately changed it back to what I had with a little twist just to make the IT boys happy.)

Then last night I signed into another financial account and my passcode didn’t work. I must have forgotten something.  I checked and re did it. Nothing. Again. Nothing. Now I was locked out.  And furious.

I was given a prompt, which said, “Please call us Monday through Friday at regular business hours.” Regular business hours.  Why would I need you then? I am on-line working when I am home and you guys are asleep in your nice warm beds.  Give me service when I need it. Too bad. No can do.

So I logged in today only to discover an email from the institution telling its customers that “Hey, we’ve changed your passcodes over the weekend.”  As in past tense.  No notification on Friday that, “This weekend we are going to change your passwords so you won’t be able to access your accounts until Monday.” NOOOO!

Talk about being hacked off.  I called. I gave the IT guy a piece of my mind and he said, “You know, I’ve been getting a lot of these calls today.” YOU THINK? His own institution had not notified IT that changes were coming this weekend. Apparently some hot shot account guy or analyst lost some records last week that had a list of codes in them and the institution was scrambling to cover their rear ends.

If I have picked a passcode. Leave it alone unless one of your numbskull ivy-league finance majors losses about a billion names and addresses and passcodes. Then send out an emergency notification that says, “We screwed up and here is your temporary passcode. Please use it for the next week then change it to a new one. We are so sorry for hiring people from Harvard and Yale.” But send it out prior to changing things. Not after the fact. Even if its by only an hour or two. That would be nice. Nothing like trying to log in on a Sunday night and not being able to get in and not knowing why until Monday morning.

And quit making us change them at random.

Passcodes are personal. And they are hard as hell to remember, as many of them as we have to keep up with. Don’t make it tougher on us by constantly requiring us to change them.

Now, if I can remember the code to get into my blog publisher, I’ll send this out.