Monday, March 06, 2006
My fingers know
I don't know the password to any of my accounts.
Really.
Wlofie and I were at Costco, doing the weekly shopping when Smirk called on my cell phone. There may be an issue with the DSL connection and could I check it out. I told Smirk that I would when I get home and hung up, by which time Wlofie had his cell phone out, flipped open the keyboard.
“We can diagnose it from here,” he said, holding out his cell phone.
“You got traceroute?”
“No, but we can ssh into a system and traceroute from there.”
So we attempted to log into my workstation (the one at The Company) but when it came time to type in my password—I couldn't.
I didn't know it.
I don't know it.
My fingers, however, know the password.
It's a very wierd thing too.
If I think too much about typing in the password I can't do it. If I consciencely try to type my password, I inevitably screw it up. And it didn't help that the layout of Wlofie's cellphone keyboard was non-standard enough to really throw me off.
We were about to give up when I realized where we were—Costco. They sell everthing here, so there must be a “real” keyboard I could type my password on—even if it was Notepad so I could see what the password was. And there were—Costo had a bunch of laptops set up for demonstration purposes.
That's when I realized something else—not only do I not know my password, but unless it's an IBM PS/2 keyboard, my fingers can't type the password. It just doesn't feel right otherwise.
We never were able to check the problem out from Wlofie's cell phone (but it turned out not to be a DSL issue at all, but a problem with a customer's computer).
