At my previous employer, we were responsible for doing our own time sheets for HR and salary purposes. The system required us to come up with a minimum of (I believe) a 12-character password that included a combination of numbers, letters and special characters. Also, we were required to change said password every 90 days. Nobody was too fond of this. I, in particular, hated it.
But I went full Beyoncé and turned my lemons into lemonade. My passwords were epic. They were full of profanities and ignorant statements like, “I Hate This Bitch” and “Fuck This Password Bro,” but obviously done in the appropriate style to be accepted by the system. Luckily, I never had to hand that password over as I had to do for our job’s network access. I made sure that password was more boring and “acceptable.”
But for emails? And for bills? Dog. While I’m not going to tell anybody or give enough clues to come up with any of my current passwords—with all of my bills and shit included, I probably have, like, 25 unique passwords; everything gets its own special joint—I have had some rather curious ones.
Like, let’s say I died and one of the conditions of dying was that I had to give up my passwords, but I didn’t know that until, like, two seconds before I was about to buy the farm, and I couldn’t get access to a computer to change anything; there might be some questions about my state of mind. And my sense of humor. There’s nothing morbid or illegal, just questionable.
Did you ever see the movie Bamboozled? It’s one of my favorite Spike Lee movies where Damon Wayans’ character, Pierre Delacroix, creates a racist television show that becomes a darling to America and then shenanigans ensue. The worst kind of white man alive, Michael Rapaport, was in it. That’s not any reason to go see it.
Anyway, the movie is filled with all types of racial slurs and shit. I like to call that movie my internet-password muse. For a time, I’d cherry-pick racial slurs right out of that movie, like Alabama porch monkeys and MustHaveBeenAWhiteGuyWhoStartedAllThat (said by MC Serch as a reference to his own 3rd Bass song, “The Gas Face”), and turn them into the gatekeepers of my information.
Because I love my family and music, I’ve had iterations of life where, if you were to find my passwords, you’d think, “He’s a family man,” or “He really valued the year 1972 in jazz.” You know—passwords with family members’ names and shit or musicians’ songs I loved. I don’t think they would trip any alarms, unlike my Bamboozled phase.
What about you, though? If somebody were to come across all of your passwords, what would they think about you? Would they think you were religious, angry, militant, all about family life, a weed head, a fan of Snoop Dogg? Or George W. Bush?
If we got your passwords, what would we think about you?
Inquiring minds would like to know.