MysteryShrink Shorts: Password Hell

In this part of Mexico there are very few channels in English which is how I was seduced into a channel that is dedicated to business and marketing. My goal had been to close my eyes for a nap, but it’ll be a while now before I drift off in this dangerous world. The topic of the program was “Getting the Customer to Work for You.”

We’re all familiar with the drill. We spend so much time working for Amazon, so much for the cable company, and if you travel you work for hotel chains and airlines on a regular basis. And we’re not even counting the time—our time—we spend on hold. Yet we do not get a check. What we get for our forced “cooperation” is more assignments.

All of us work for the biggest marketers in the world—Google, Yahoo, MSN, Microsoft—you know the rest. We do their inventory, their marketing surveys, their ‘customer finding’ and if they are deep enough into us, we’ll even supply a constant feedback evaluating their service and telling them how to change to get more of our money and time.

We start our unpaid workday when we “sign on.” Once our time cards are clicked in, we’re on the job. Our every move is recorded. When we sign off, the card comes out of the clock. The misery is whoever we’re working for at one moment, say, Google, wants to keep us working for them and only them. Thus, our sign-on, our password, is critical. There’s more than one company out there who wants our free labor, thus passwords are carefully guarded.

The tease is that forcing us to sign in everywhere is to protect our security when the purpose is to sign us on as unpaid workers. And everything you try to do to uncomplicate the system is met with a new complication so that you give up, grab your hair, curse, and jump through yet another set of password hoops until you have your sign-ins for all these different companies straightened out.

Now, let’s say your computer goes down and you purchase a new one or for some reason you have to restart certain elements. Of course, you remember your most recent passwords, right? Well, no, but you have them listed on a cleverly named document. Only one problem. You can’t get there from here.

Welcome to Password Hell. This is how it all ends. You die and appear at the Gates of Heaven. St. Peter greets you warmly and says, “Hello, yes you’re good to go. You’re right here on my list. Just this one thing, I need your password, the name of your first pet, and the name of the doctor who delivered you into this world.”