Creating the Perfect Password

Sometimes I feel like a ridiculously large percentage of my brain is used by remembering all of the various passwords that I use in my life.

There must be dozens of them. Maybe even hundreds. There's a handful for work. One for my home computer. One for my bank. Several for each of the online bill sites that I visit to pay my bills. One for my health insurance company's site. One for my husband's health insurance company's site. The list goes on and on.

It's a bit maddening. My poor brain could be using those cells to store pleasant things, like fond memories of friends and family and good times. Yet those neurons are saddled with the most boring job description around: remember several strings of characters as well as which websites or computers those strings belong to.

The Master Password

Wouldn't it be great to have just ONE password for everything? Then you could send most of those poor beleaguered brain cells on vacation, and when they return, give them a brand-new and much more fun job.

But creating a master password would be complex. It would be both a science and an art. It would, in fact, be a feat of creative writing, on a tiny scale.

It would have to meet the following requirements at the very least:

• Uncrackable, even by people who know you (no names of your pets, spouse, children, hometown, your username spelled backward, etc.)
• Exactly 8 characters in length (I've seen sites that require at least 8 characters, and a few that require exactly 8 characters, but never any sites that require fewer than 8)
• Easy for you to remember
• Easily tweakable to meet the stringent requirements of certain sites. Here's what I mean by tweakable. Some sites require that your password contain only letters, while other sites require at least one number and one symbol in addition to letters. So an ideal password would allow characters to be swapped out easily for numbers or symbols. For instance, you could use the word migraine as your password, and if you encounter a site that requires a number and a symbol, you could substitute an exclamation point for the first i, and substitute the number 3 for the letter E, so that you get m!grain3.
  

That's a tall order. I don't even know if it's possible, given the many different requirements demanded by various computer systems.

And then, of course, there are the companies that require your password to be changed every few weeks. So you'd have to go through the entire master-password creation process again several times a year.

On second thought, I don't know that this would be a creative process after all. It might only be an exercise in futility. What do you think?