Your Name's Not Down...

When I was a youngster my parents read me a story. It was supposed to be about three little pigs but to me it was always The Story of the Persistent Wolf. He went through the same routine every night…

‘Little pig, little pig, let me come in.’
‘No, no, not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin.’

I loved the idea that, even though he kept getting knocked back, the wolf kept on giving it his best shot. To me, that persistence made him the real hero of the story.

When I got a little older and had hair on my own chinny-chin-chin I kept trying to get into nightclubs. And I kept getting the same reaction each time from the gangsters dressed in dinner suits who manned the door.

‘Your name’s not down, your not coming in.’

I’m even older now and my chinny-chin-chin hair is mostly grey with a highly unattractive ginger patch near the middle, but there  are some things that never change.

‘Access denied. Please re-enter password’

But I only want to check my bank details.

‘Access denied. Please re-enter password’

But it’s the right password. It’s the one I use for everything.

 ‘Access denied. Please re-enter password’

I daren’t. That’s three goes; any more wrong efforts and it’ll bar me forever, meaning that I’ll have to go to my nearest branch (ten miles away) and stand in a line with people that I don’t know (and like even less) just to do the most menial of tasks. Like get hold of my own money.

What really galls me about this kind of thing is that it’s not really asking for my password. My password is a lovely word, one that is really easy for me to remember because it means something to me personally. I’ll never ever forget that word. That’s why I chose it.

What it’s really asking is ‘Please enter the password that you thought up on the spur of the moment when I said your normal password didn’t meet my security standards; the password that must include some capitals, some numbers and some of those squiggly things that you only find in Wingdings font’. It’s not a password that I want, nor is it one that I’ll remember. And seeing as the bank advise me never to write it down, it’s one that will fade away like tears in rain within seconds of me first using it.

So once again it’s time for me to dance to their merry tune and jump through their hoops and mix several dodgy metaphors just so that I can get to my own cash.

In the meantime, ‘Beloved, can you cash me a cheque? Yes, again’.

© Shaun Finnie 2012