To begin with, some musings written two years ago...

Monday June 28, 2004

I finally got MS Office installed on my notebook PC today. I had bought the PC on the 1^st of April, so it’s taken me almost 3 months to get a simple decision out of the way. I wanted to buy it a long time ago, actually, but the fact that it would cost me more than $300 was putting me off. I would have looked like the biggest fool around for buying something which half the world uses pirated copies of. Not that I don’t look like the biggest fool anyway. Maybe that had something to do with my decision in the end. That and the fact that a friend’s friend works in Microsoft, so I could get him to buy it for me… it cost him only $50. Yeah, maybe that was the final reason, the coup de grace. Is that right? Is “coup de grace” the correct phrase here? You would think I’d know this, what with my four-month stint at l’Alliance Française de Poona. But then, I don’t remember too much about Chemical Engineering, despite my four-year stint at learning it. Real short-term memory, eh?

I am now getting used to typing on a laptop. Not an easy job, what with me fretting over how hard I press the keys all the time. Especially the perennial fall-guy, Enter. That poor key (and the Esc one) has to suffer at the hands of every user anytime something doesn’t happen in the expected way. Or even if it does. Or when someone really wants to emphasize their acceptance of something. As if a more strongly pressed Enter would be equivalent to a “Yes-to-All” or something. Never ceases to amaze me. I could actually write a complete book about keyboard habits and what they tell you about what Jeeves calls the psychology of the individual. I really could, I am that paranoid, you know. Maybe that reflects in my keyboard habits. It’s really interesting how the psychology of an individual is reflected in the tools s/he uses. Now I have only used computers and vehicles so far. And a lot of computer software that requires you to log-in using a username and a “secret” password. A password definitely tells a lot about the individual and what goes on in his mind (I am quitting being a feminist and am going to refer only to the masculine pronouns for the rest of these scratch-notes). So, a password tells a lot about what goes on in the person’s mind, or was going on in his mind when he set the password. Some real interesting ones, noticed over a career of two years as a software engineer, and offering a very good insight into the state of the person’s mind, have ranged from “mywife” to “lifesux” to “thedominator” and “j8h3x0i4”. I mean, “mywife” is either very romantic or very henpecked, not sure which. Someone who likes to type “lifesux” at the beginning of every day must really believe it does. Poor guy must be having a hard time. As for “thedominator”, I think you will give a knowing smile when I tell you that that’s the password of a system administrator, a very egoistic sys-admin, at that. One of those whom you have to take out for a cup of tea and bow your head in obeisance every time you see him, to get your program installed on the system. As for that weird combination of alphabets and numerals (weird combination of alpha-numeric characters, if you will), it can belong to either of the following two types of individuals. One, those that take the “IT guy’s” instructions too seriously to include these numbers and characters in the password and ends up with a password that needs to be carried in the wallet at all times, thus completely beating the purpose; or Two, someone as paranoid as me. So you already know what kind of passwords I might be setting. Don’t ask me how I know the others. They are not mine, that’s the truth. My passwords tend to have a capital N in them, an N in the upper case. Why? Just because. It actually started with my first password at work. I was still too big an X-files fan to forego any opportunity of emulating Fox Mulder. So my password was going to be “trustno1.” Except, the company’s password policy stated that I should have at least one upper-case letter in my password. For some reason, I chose N. I have no idea why. At least, I don’t remember why. Maybe later in the day, when I’m recounting these stories to the unfortunate grandchildren, I might hit upon it. Maybe not. It’s this short-term memory thing again.

Anyway, so it turns out that all my passwords ended up having an uppercase N in them. And since the company policy also states that I should change my password every two months and that I can’t re-use any of my last ten passwords, it gave me plenty of room to be “creative”. It’s actually quite difficult to be really creative in a “process-driven” company like the one I work in (in my first project, even the commenting in the code was of a specific fashion!!!), so any opportunity you get, you take it. Meaning I managed to phrase a lot of common words together, making sure that there was one (and not more than one) N in them. I actually can’t remember all the passwords of my career (this short-term memory blah blah), but I am sure I will encounter one of them again, when I re-think a certain phrase and it turns out to be one of those “last ten” that the company keeps track of.

Later on, more precisely when I came to America, the size of my small and secluded world of capital N’ed passwords expanded exponentially due to the happenstance of having to log into my client’s computer network. Add to that, I had all the other passwords for email accounts, and for the website from which I was buying the phone-cards to call home, then the quintessential Amazon.com password. Plus there were the passwords for all the software applications and systems that I was supposed to work on every day, and each of these would have a development region, a testing region and a production region. In short, a lot of passwords to remember and a lot of creativity to be exercised. At that stage, I resorted to the same path that every creativity-starved Hindi film-maker treads on: reuse and rejoice. Use some part of a previously tried and tested story, make it slightly different and voila, a “new” entity. Of course, I did add some creativity to it. I decided that each of my passwords would have a part of my name and a part of the system whose password it was. Like the password for a website that allows you to meet your friends etc (called orkut.com) became kauskut. I know it sounds a lot like the usual new-government promise to cut costs, but it did help me in remembering it. Although I admit kausamazon did not exactly make me feel like the male chauvinist pig that I am (making me sometimes believe that “mywife” isn’t so bad after all). It did help me in my chief endeavor to remember those darned passwords though. Even when it was time to change them, as is frequently the case with passwords as already discussed, I could easily come up with an eminently unforgettable substitute. And I have for all of the ones mentioned above, so if you are thinking of trying to log-in using any of those above mentioned passwords, I’d advise you to waste your time at predicting (or “forecasting” if you will) the weather or hunting for aliens or any other such relatively plausible activities.

So, finally, why do I spend so much time writing these musings? Was I really so inspired by the statement that this “free association writing” brings out innermost thoughts, till then un-imagined? Or is it that I simply try to show-off my writing “skills”. I don’t really know.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Enough for the day. I will try to make this a one-per-day feature, just to see if I can continue to manage to keep my acquaintances out of it. Perhaps I will. Hopefully I won’t.