Do you remember all your passwords??

I had been bombarded lately by a few friends and my younger sibs about me being a techno dinosour, just for not being a member of MSN Messenger. Frankly, I really do not see any point in signing up for the program. First being, I have clean forgotten my Hotmail account password. I still remembered being very frustrated over this during my internet hey-days for all the unread forwarded mails in my hotmail account. Secondly, I still do prefer ICQ. There was one point in my life the 'uh-ohs' made me drop all things on hand just to relish the messages. *fond memories :)* Most importantly, I really will not and vow not to have another password to remember. That said, Yahoo! clinched my loyalty with their upgraded 250 MB mail storage.

WE, WE, WE really have too many things to remember - for life. It vexed me very much in Secondary Four I could not remember all the maths formulas learnt from Secondary One onwards and I had to revise backwards while all my friends had it all ingrained snugly in their brains. I took to manual A4 size written notes to remind myself all the anniversaries, relatives' & friends' birthdays and had them stuck to the fridge for constant viewing.

On top of that, I have to remember all my home addresses, all kinds of contact numbers and the creme de la creme of all got to be all my online accounts' usernames and their relevant passwords. From blog account access, my Friendster and Amazon accounts, my office MacIntosh access, my icq, my handphone, my voice mail, my various corporate accounts (on behalf of bosses who have no inkling), my atm card, my internet bank accounts, my email accounts, you get the drift, to just about anything. Practically everything needs an "Open Sesame". Very recently, I tried to go online for some government-document procedure *to file my income tax lah!* and I didn't even know I have a SingPass??!!

Most atrocious!! It's worse for those financial accounts, like the bank "advising" you to destroy that important piece of password slip once you memorised it... and when you forget... duh... Now confess, do you really throw that away or do we all keep it somewhere with fervent prayers no one will ever find that important scrap of paper that hold all your fortune? Think about this, you will not even keep all your passwords in your palm pilot unless you locked the info with another password *again* yeah? No one will even consider having a generic password for everything - in case some serious hackers you offended decide to wipe out your identity or your BANK! (macham worse).

So what triggered the fire in my rantings today? Nah~~ just some random thoughts while fuming over that SINGPASS thingy. Am I hearing someone shouting "Welcome to the real virtual world"? I hate making calls to any governmental institutions... I hate to press '1' for English and blah, blah, blah before I get any personal operator's assistance. What is my Singpass username & password?? I'm late in filing my income tax!!

*Sigh~~~~* I guess I just gotta learn to live with it... so I am going down to the CPF Building later.