I’m flailing about in the grip of a new syndrome it just wouldn’t have been possible to contract say, twenty years ago when life was more innocent. Twenty years ago we could leave the house without our phone and not immediately start hyperventilating and we didn’t have to check an inbox every three minutes. Nor did we have to waste hours pondering the micro-blurts of gossip on Twitter or the nasty anonymous comments on other people’s websites. Okay, so there was hate mail twenty years ago but it wasn’t posted cruelly and instantly online; the folks who hated you back then had to really commit to the contents of their poisonous letters while queuing for stamps. (I was once sent anonymous hate mail over the name I chose for my daughter. What was that about?) But above all, back then there were far fewer passwords that needed to be recalled on the spot unless you happened to be a secret agent or a pirate or something.

I can work myself into a password amnesia related worry spiral at least three times a day. Pretty soon I’m going to need to go to password stress related rehab. The sheer number of passwords required to navigate my way about my business mean that I just can’t keep up anymore and to make matters worse I haven’t created a system to store them in the one place because I’m paranoid about writing them down at all. What if someone hacks into my Science Diet dog food account and steals my mature bite biscuits?

Furthermore, schools are a ‘cashless society’ now and so much of the parent communication is done through email and via e- newsletter; tasks such as extra- curricular sports enrolments are all done through something called a Sportal. You need to be on top of all your school ‘portal’ related passwords and the school account passwords which will directly involve the wellbeing of your child and your ability to hobnob at chook raffles (which are probably done ticket-free and online as well requiring yet another password).

To make matters worse all my family’s passwords differ wildly, are inspired by an array of personal sources and are invariably case sensitive. There are Mathletics passwords, Premier’s Reading Challenge passwords, Moshi Monsters passwords and that’s just for starters. For the record I think I may have a computer password, iTunes password, Twitter password, Video rental password, the password that makes the internet work when it breaks down as it frequently does, an ISP password, credit card password(s), club membership passwords, the passwords to operate this very website- and a host of others that I’ve forgotten existed but will be reminded of when I’m put on the spot and asked for them.

Picture me foraging in the pantry for fresh slices of bread for a Monday morning lunchbox. Emerging from the pantry empty handed I head to the computer. ‘I’ll order something for her,’ I think to myself, determined to get her chicken salad wrap order in before the cut off. I bounce from Google to the cyber-tuck shop (this in itself is weird enough, tuck shops and computers don’t exactly seem to go hand in hand) and there it is, ‘login details’ blinking up at me, accompanied by a yawning empty box awaiting a password. I crack my knuckles in anticipation pushing down the rising panic. I know these account details, it’s fine, take it easy, I say under my breath and start by entering the name of my first pet. Wrong. It’s nearly time to leave the house and she doesn’t have lunch sorted. My birthdate? My dad’s birthdate? WRONG again. My mother’s maiden name? My maiden name? Uh-uh it can’t be that, that still is my name. Or did I think I was being super-tricky by making my password my actual name? Ah ha! They’d never guess! But, hang on, why would they want to steal money from my children’s tuck shop fund anyway? What exactly are they going to do with that money when it can only be spent in the tuckshop itself? Do they want to fill a bathtub entirely with Grain Waves and Eucalyptus Balls or something?

Look is there a password system people have in place that beats my sticky Post-its on the fridge that get pulled off by my four-year-old and fed to the dog when we are low on Science Diet (because I’ve forgotten that password too)? Are we meant to hide our passwords in the sock drawer with other unmentionables? In fifty years will folks look back in disbelief, and say ‘can you fathom the primitive system of multiple passwords those Neanderthals had back then? It’s so much better now we have one password imprinted on our retina at birth!’

It occurs to me as I write this that perhaps my dilemma has more to do with my own mental shortcomings than our modern technological society. When I was younger I had a talent, a party trick, for being able to remember the phone numbers of everyone I knew. Of course a talent like that is meaningless now that it is not required, but maybe that yawning, empty space in my brain should be filled with all my passwords. Yes. I’m going to start inputting the data directly into my working memory. Now what are my passwords?