Password hell

My life, like many people's lives, consists of what I call password hell. Password hell is where you're at when you do a lot of business online and have various account names and passwords scattered all over cyber land. The account name part isn't too difficult, as you can usually use your email address or at least the email name without the domain information. However, every system seems to have a slightly different idea about what they allow for passwords. Some systems require letters, numbers, and symbols. Other systems only allow the numbers and symbols. And others have specific requirements around how many characters you can have, or they assign your password for you in some random combination of things that you'll never remember. The list goes on.

Honestly, it's a wonder I can remember to put shoes on before I leave the house most days, so remembering all of these specials rules for the bazillion online accounts I have is mind boggling. This morning I tried to access an old 401K account, because I realized that they must not have my newest address as I have not received a quarterly statement for some time. After three attempts, I was locked out, which is better than having some hacker be able to access my account. So, I selected to have my password sent to me. It wasn't until I'd selected the "send me my password" option that I learned "send" was used in a postal sense, not an electronic sense. This is an example of poor UI text, but I digress. Considering that I have not been receiving statements, I'm 100% sure that the password documents won't be making it to me either. Now I have to wait for their business hours to start to try and fix the whole bloody mess. And based on previous experience, I'll go through automated phone hell trying to get to an actual person on the other end of the line.