Passwords!

There nearly wasn’t a diary entry this week.

And it’s all because of…

Passwords!

Passwords are a necessary evil – a real pain - especially when you forget then!

You see, I’m writing this on a plane – Mrs A and I are flying to RIGA in Latvia.

I had some, well actually quite a lot, of airmiles which BA cheerfully told me would expire if I didn’t use some or add some more. This was a few weeks ago – when I mumbled something about it to MRs A, she frogmarched me to the computer to find a suitable destination for a long weekend.

We’ve always wanted to go to Prague, but there were no flights available. We worked through Central European capitals looking for a direct flight and Riga was, well, the only option. Happily though, I’ve only heard good things about it and it looks like a good choice.

The reason there nearly wasn’t a diary entry is that we’re travelling light. I didn’t want to lug my main laptop around – I have a little tablet sized one for such things. Last night I switched it on to get all the updates out the way and entered the wrong password.

This isn’t an unusual occurrence – it’s easy to mistype, but I tried again, and again – computer says no.

Now – some background info is needed here. I have an IT guy who is a bit paranoid – which actually isn’t a bad thing in an IT guy, what with hackers and phishing attacks. But he won’t let me use facial recognition and forces me to change my password every 3 months.

Thinking up a new password every three months is no small feat! Especially one that has capitals, lower case, numbers and special characters.

That you can remember without writing it down!

Last time I had to change it, it took me about 40 minutes to think of something that it would accept!

So last night when I tried to login, I realised that the last time I used this pc was before I last changed my password, so I would need the old one.

Which I hadn’t written down and for the life of me I couldn’t remember.

I mean, I had a vague idea, but computer don’t deal in vague. They don’t say -oh yeah, that’s close enough – I’ll let you in this time – just try to remember for next time will you?

So I had to ‘log a ticket’.

This morning, IT guy logs in to my mini laptop. Great I thought – we’ve got an hour before we have to leave – plenty of time!

How wrong can you be!

IT guy phones to say he can’t see my screen so can I please reboot?

This triggered a torrent of updates which took about 45 minutes and was getting perilously close to the our deadline for leaving.

Anyway – he came through – we just got it all done – just in time.

So I’m now on a plane, which cost me nothing, after a bus journey and tube to Heathrow, which also cost me nothing (coz I’m old)– neat huh?

Earlier this week we had a bit of drama. Hijo phoned me at work on Tuesday and said Mrs A and he had been in a road accident in the Tesla. He quickly assured me they were both OK.

At the end of the M1 someone had run into the back of them at Staples corner.

The other driver was pretty decent about it and gave his details etc, but as it turns out, we had it all on video, as the Tesla records front back and both sides whenever there’s an ‘incident’.

You know what it’s like with insurance companies – this chewed up a couple of hours of my week filling in forms and trying to upload the video footage. Anyway, we just got a text to say our no-claims bonus is intact!

I’m sure there will be plenty of stories from Riga – tune in next week to find out what we got up to.

Have a good ‘un.

Jerry