Password Inanity

If you can tell me right now how many passwords you have to remember, how many times you have to enter one a day, how many of them are unique, or how many are the same, then you probably live in North Korea.

It seems like every website and its dog wants to know your life story (and your dog's) before you can do anything meaningful. Another endless questionnaire to fill in, another unique username to pick, and yet another password to go with it. Passwords are clever and practical if you're in the military or belong to a secret society, because you're unlikely to belong to more than one of them. Imagine if every shop you walked into for the first time asked you to create a username and a password. Why are we putting up with this madness online?

Under the barrage of our daily password requests, our most common coping mechanism is surely to reuse them. If we were truly free to pick our own passwords then the drama would end here. But that would be too easy. We're also told how our passwords should look, by some invisible authority, who has decided that a password without a number is weak. No wait! Two numbers. Do I hear 3? The gentleman in the back with the Top Gun sunglasses. How about 4? Arabic letters? Hieroglyphics?

Can the gentleman with the Top Gun sunglasses please remove them so I can smack him with a shoe? I write this, of course, because for yet another in a myriad times, I encounter a site for which my password isn't good enough. I present a montage of 3 password forms, each with their own arbitrary password restrictions. Can you come up with a usable password that will work for all three and still be memorable?