Once upon a time in a Persian town, there were two brothers. One was a much better hacker than the other. The first brother stumbled on a password, carelessly scribbled on a sticky note and stuck to the underside of a keyboard. Thus he was able to open a secret door, sneak into a cave filled with stolen treasure, and take a pouch of coins, small enough not to be noticed. 

The second brother, learning of this success, decided he’d go a little bigger, hacked his way into the cave, loaded himself and a bunch of mules down with enough treasure that it would most certainly be missed, and then promptly forgot the password to get back out of the cave. Then the thieves who’d stolen the treasure to begin with, returned to the cave and did a little hacking of their own.

It’s a familiar story of course, added to the collection of Middle Eastern tales One Thousand and One Nights in the eighteenth century by French translator Antoine Galland who heard the tale from Syrian storyteller Hanna Diyab. It also feels a little bit like the story of my life. 

I don’t mean the part about the hacking. Rest assured, I have no skills whatsoever in that area. Most of the time I can’t even remember my own passwords. I have zero brainspace left over for yours, even if I overhear you loudly proclaim them at the hidden door leading to your treasure trove.

In fact, were you to leave your password written down on a sticky note underneath your keyboard, your biggest concern should be that I would mistype it enough times that I’d accidentally lock you out of your cave. And if I ever ask you the name of your first pet, I assure you, I’m just curious. Also, I’ll probably forget that, too.

Like most of us I have a pretty contentious relationship with passwords. I recognize they are necessary. So much of our lives are stored digitally now and it is certainly important to safeguard our privacy and our treasure from unscrupulous people with enough skills and mules to try to steal it. 

But I also feel like it’s a little much. For example, why exactly do I need a password to protect my popcorn rewards at my local movie theater? Are there a lot of hackers who are anxious to steal my $2 off coupon? And do I care enough to dedicate already pretty crowded memory space to a unique password made up of a minimum of ten characters that must include both upper and lower case letters, a number, a symbol, a sign of the zodiac, a knock-knock joke, and a blood sacrifice? 

The experts, who I assume in some cases are the hackers themselves, say the era of passwords may be coming to an end anyway. In the coming decades the whole system may be replaced entirely by biometrics. As often as the fingerprint scanner on my phone fails and I have to either put in a password or wait thirty seconds and try again to see if my thirty-second-older fingerprint works any better, I’m not yet convinced that will be a huge improvement.

But in the meantime, we will just have to hustle to stay a step ahead of the hackers with our wily strings of ever-changing mixed-up characters. To aid in that effort, I am reminding you that today, February 1, is apparently Change Your Password Day. I suspect that, like me, you have too many passwords floating around in your head to remember such a thing. So, you know, take a little time today to change up your one thousand and one passwords and be proactive in protecting your vital information. And your popcorn coupons.