Autumn authentication

It’s November 22, and I had a good day; such a good day, in fact, that I was going to spend several paragraphs writing about the beauty of the light this afternoon. For just a few days in late November, right around Thanksgiving, the afternoon light has a clear and golden quality that is only present for a few precious days of the year. The sun is almost as far away from Earth as it gets and the trees are almost but not quite bare and the remaining canopy is a golden orange that colors the sunlight, and the sky when it’s clear is the palest pearl gray with only a barely visible hint of blue and twilight comes so suddenly and so early.

So I was going to write all about that, all about the elegiac beauty of the fading autumn and winter approaching and blah blah blah-bitty blah blah blah. And then I came home and tried to log in to online banking to pay my bills and forgot that I had changed my password and now my account is disabled; and with the realization that I have no choice but to call the bank to have my access restored, I felt my will to live exit my body with a great rushing noise. Plus it’s dark now, anyway. Bloody hell. Bloody fucking hell.

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So now it’s Saturday. I went to the bank to get my account number because I couldn’t bear the thought of calling on the phone to ask for it because I knew that they'd ask me fifty-seven questions for my own security. Now I just have to go through the 50-step re-authentication process that will restore my online access to my own money. I’m not so much writing right now as avoiding. After I finish here, maybe there’s a toilet that I can scrub. Maybe there’s some goo at the bottom of the refrigerator that I can clean up. Maybe I can have root canal or something.

You know, I work in an IT organization, and the problem of authentication is one that we discuss quite often. By “we” I mean other people who are technically capable and qualified, of course. I listen, though. And that's how I know that log-ins and passwords are intrinsically insecure because we are people and we like shortcuts. We’re also idiots who forget the passwords that we create and then we either write them down (as I should have and as I normally do), leaving them vulnerable to detection by malefactors (how I love that word); or we end up locked out of our accounts and we have to start over again (as I’m avoiding doing right now).

And you know what else? “Pay bills” was on my to-do list for this week. But “restore access to online banking” was not. So not only have I not crossed off a critical to-do item; but now I also have to do a much more painful and onerous task and I don’t get to cross it off the list because it wasn’t on there in the first place. And no, I can’t just add it to the list and then cross it off. That’s not cricket. It’s just not done.

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OK, disregard most of the previous, because that was nothing! So easy! I recovered my account number, followed the prompts, verified my security code, reset my password, confirmed my reset password, did that again because the passwords didn't match, and here we are. My bills are paid, my list is crossed off, and equilibrium is restored. Such a big fuss about nothing at all. I feel rather silly. All is quite well. Except that it's November 25. The light was extraordinary this afternoon, but we will have it for only a few more days.