A customer calls. She cannot
access the online tool she purchased 6 months ago and is now getting around to
using it.
“Hi, this is James. What can I
do for you?”
“Yes, I can’t access the data
that I purchased because I can’t log in.”
“No problem! Do you remember
your username and password?”
“I remember my username, it’s my
first initial and last name all lower case, but I can’t remember my password.”
“That is quite alright. I can
email your password to you.”
“Just tell it to me before you
try to email it to me?”
“Ahhhhh. Let me unencrypt it.”
James tries to sound busy by lightly
tapping the keys on his keyboard so it sounds like he was typing, but he’s not
really typing. He starts thinking about the word unencrypt. “That’s not a
word.” Since it wasn’t a word he thought of the word crypt.
He thought about the 3rd
grade field trip he took to a crypt. It was pretty scary. The class walked over
to where there were old white stone coffins. They were raised about 3 feet off
the ground. They had black stains that seemed to drip over the side but never
hit the ground. Even the stones looked dead.
James remembered pitying the
taller third graders because when he walked past the coffins he was at the
perfect height to see inside of them but not have to smell inside of them. He
was shocked to find that there was nothing inside. Actually, It was the fact
that he was so shocked to find nothing inside of the first one that he looked
in every single open coffin. They were empty. All of them.
He wondered whether or not the
closed coffins were empty. He wanted to open one. He thought it would be like
Indiana Jones in the “Last Crusade”. He wondered if he would find a cool sword.
It doesn’t matter how much fire is burning around him, he would have picked up
that sword and taken it with him.
He wondered if he could hide the
sword from his teacher, Mrs. Dutler. Mrs. Dutler was a jerk. James visited her
church one Sunday and she told him that he would never be smart or tall because
he was not Dutch and because his dad did not believe that women should hold a
church office.
“Are you done encrypting the
password yet?”
“Sorry this is taking so long.
Almost done.”
He squeezed a fist above his
mouse to get the blood flowing. When he did that he remembered what it felt
like when he thrust the throttle of the tractor so that he could make it up a
sharp incline. He remembered how the incline would make his son’s head shift
involuntarily from his neck to his shoulder blade as he fell asleep on him. He
remembered the gentle hum of the tractor, and clanging like Christmas bells of
the chisel and the harrow nervously scratching the soil behind him.
At that moment, there was no hum
and Christmas was still far off. The mouse was not nearly as powerful as the
throttle. Excalibur did not lie at the bottom of the coffin and 3rd
grade was really just the second half of 2nd grade.
He wished the password line was
empty. He wished it was as empty as the field was from noise and the tractor
from people and the coffin from swords and dead people and his typing from
actually making words. He wished that the password line was as empty as the
meaning of 3rd grade and the word unencrypt. But it wasn’t.
“Your password is I<3butts.”
“Oh, I used that one” The voice
on the other end said with absolutely no remorse like she had an entire arsenal
of stupid passwords ready to be deployed at a moments notice. James couldn’t
help think that it was odd that she remembered the rather in depth criteria for
a functional username but could not remember her very stupid and personal
password.
He also thought that it could
have been a brilliant tactic to keep a password from being stolen. He though
that somewhere a Russian guy named Vladimir with round mettle framed glasses and
long greasy black hair that he would often have to be swipe out of the way so
he could see out of his left eye is kicking himself saying, “I vould have never
guessed it vas zat! Now I vill never know how much a lawyer makes in Cleveland!”
“Would you like me to change it
manually?” James asked.
“No, I’m in now. Thanks for the
help.”
“Anytime”
