Password by Barbara Lucy Hosken

He has a book full of passwords for everything under the sun. If he needs one he creates another, ranging through the names of his children, dog, boat and car, to combinations of family initials, birthdates etc. He constantly complains about them, regularly loses them and always has to look them up. He often finds they do not work because he has changed them and forgotten to record the changes. He doesn’t trust a computer record because he once had a disgusting virus which meant that he lost a tremendous amount of material, including the list of passwords he had at the time. He prefers to trust his little black book, which is secreted in a drawer far from his desktop. It’s in a totally different room at the opposite end of the house from his office so discovering a password is a major operation. First find the book. Passwords are truly the bane of his life. She, on the other hand, has one password which she uses for everything. On the rare occasion when she needs a longer one, she adds the numbers of her childhood home address. “I never need more digits than that.” she says. He constantly suggests she lets him record it in his notebook, warning her that someone will find out what it is and then she’ll lose everything. “That’ll only happen if you tell someone,” she says. “But I don’t know it.” “Precisely.” She smiles and walks away knowing he’ll never guess it’s “iluvyoo”.

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