The man who wore my password

Florida, 2005. On those days when I’d drive home from work a bit too late or a bit too hungry, my default dinner option was the Italian deli around the corner. It looked like a 7-Eleven, stocked canned beans and white cotton socks and other things surely no one ever bought, had a thousand different lottery options, and ran three TVs set to CNN 24/7. But: the deli was damn good. Freshly kneaded mozzarella balls, salami Boar’s Head never even heard of, bread loaves stacked like sandbags on a levee. And damn good NY-style pizza - thin, simple, and always satisfying. I’d order it in English and hear it echoed down the kitchen in Italian.

This, and the fact that the building which housed the deli was about eight times the size of the customer-accessible space, gave me the distinct impression that the place was a front. I know how that sounds, but look - fronts actually exist, as does the mob, right?

So there I was one day when I was too late and too hungry, waiting in line for my two slices of cheese and a Diet Coke. I gazed around, taking in the novelty cigarette-lighters and phony energy pills and boner pills, landing finally on the back of the dirty T-shirt worn by the rotund gentleman waiting in front of me. There, in large and very legible type, was my password. My super-safe password, on the back of his shirt.

Me, I use a three-tiered approach to passwords. I have a “regular” password for things like email, a “throwaway” password for random forums and junk, and a “safe” password for banking etc. When I come back to a website I haven’t visited in a while, I trust my assessment of which tier this would fall under, and use the appropriate password. All three passwords are fairly safe (non-dictionary words, completely unrelated to pets and birthdays) and the “financial” one is the longest and the trickiest.

So that really long, really tricky password shouldn’t be on a sweaty dude’s shirt in a pizza shop, it really shouldn’t. Yet there it was. For a few seconds I entertained the idea that I had entered a Matrix/Inception world where people and signs were basically UI elements. I pondered tapping my password, and felt a little disappointed in The Architect for showing it in plain text, no bullet-point obfuscation or anything.

Then rationality kicked in and I figured I’d work my way backwards: how had I picked my non-word, non-pet password in the first place? My three passwords are sounds that for one reason or another get lodged in my brain; this makes them impossible to forget, though not so easy to figure out independently. 

••••••••••, I thought, ••••••••••… What was that? Then it came back to me: a memory of my commute home. Every day I drove past the same forest of roadside signs. This being Florida, there was a lot of road and a lot of signs. Many of them came and went, but one was there probably since the beginning of time, humbly marking some sort of machining business. The name was extremely odd - difficult to pronounce, not following the rules of English word formation, and with a clumsy poetry to its hard-to-parse syllables. The sign was simple, a white non-word on blue. The same blue as the dude’s shirt.

Like I said, a rotund fellow wearing a stained shirt, perspiring quite visibly and olfactibly - surely an employee of some sort of machining business. I had based my password on the weird-ass name of this forgotten shop; eventually my brain adopted it as my password and my password only; somehow it screened the word out when I drove past the shop every day; but seeing it anew in this completely unexpected context - on a shirt worn by a dude taking a break from working at that very shop to enjoy some delicious nearby pizza -  broke my poor cerebrum and left me with visions of virtual worlds.

I bet that li'l business is still there, advertising my password to the world. Perhaps they have a truck or a van with the name on its side in even bigger letters. The fact that their sign and their shirt were matching in look leads me to believe that they’re savvy enough to have a website, so you could probably visit [nevenssupersafepassword].com. 

Now, what did I base my other two passwords on…?