Thursday, January 25, 2007

A sad tale of technology dependence

Sometimes I hate technology.

Several months ago I decided to turn over a new leaf and start using better passwords.  So when I got this cool new Sony Vaio laptop, I set it up with a really good password that I had never used before.  It was long and it contained a bunch of mixed case letters and numbers and funky punctuation.  I made sure nobody was ever going to guess this password.  Not even me.

And then I immediately forgot it.

Fortunately, this particular laptop has a fingerprint sensor.  What a cool piece of technology!  I still have no idea what my password is, but every morning I simply drag my index finger over the sensor and Windows logs me in.

Last night in the woodshop I sliced my index finger open while attempting to see if a plane iron was sharp yet.  (It was.)

Today, my &*%#$@! laptop thinks my fingerprint has changed.

It was funny at first.  I tried every password I could remember.  Then I started to get frustrated.

I searched my desk to see if perhaps I wrote the password down somewhere.  No luck.

After a while, I started to get angry.  Why do things like this always seem to happen before I've had any coffee?

I tried the finger swipe again.  Nope.

My condition started to degrade from angry to irrational.  I hated computers.  I considered dropping the laptop out my fourth floor window.

I tried swiping my index finger in all kinds of different ways.  Still no luck.

I wished I had never seen a computer before.  I remembered the Amish community just south of Champaign and wondered if they would take me in.

I tried using the middle finger instead.  I knew it wouldn't work, but at the time I just felt like that was the appropriate finger to use.

I picked up the phone to call my parents and blame them for giving birth to me at the wrong point in history.  And as I was dialing, the fingerprint swipe suddenly worked, probably because I had been trying for so long that my finger had time to heal.

The new password on my laptop is "Eric".  And just in case I forget my name, I'm going to write it on the outside of the case with a Sharpie.