I stumped myself!

I have a lot of passwords for my computer to access various sites that we receive advertising and email from. I have been able to memorize a great many of them, but for my memories sake, and for other people to use at some future time, I have them stored safely away.
Some are as simple as a four-digit number much like you have for your bank access card. Others combine numbers, the alphabet and keyboard characters. Some are as many as 16 digits long for added security. Security tells you never to write your passwords down in case someone stumbles across them.
For those really longer passwords, I have not been able to memorize them. I have broken the rule and have written them down.
Last November, I acquired a wireless router to use in the apartment that my wife and I were renting in Winnipeg. My son helped set it up and insisted on using a separate administrator password and a separate user password for privacy issues. After our three-week stay, we packed the router back into its box and brought it home.
In creating the passwords we chose not to use any passwords that we were currently using, and to create new simple easy to remember passwords for our apartment router. We followed my son’s advice and knowing that they were both simple and easy to remember we never gave them another thought.
If we had written the passwords down or placed them in our computers or cell phones or tablets, it would have been a good thing to do. It’s now July, seven months later and we are set to use the router again. The computers that we were using, and tablets back in November will still connect.
That is the good thing. But my wife has a new cell phone and trying to have it connect to the Internet has proven a challenge. We have company coming and we expect that they would like to connect to the Internet with portable devices. We can’t remember what that simple password is that we put into the router last November. I can’t remember what the administrator password is to reset the password. I can remember thinking this password is really easy to remember and the router software told me it was highly secure. I was really quite proud of setting the router and software up. Now I am feeling foolish.
Every variation on what the password might be has failed. I seem to remember that it was a combination of letters and numbers. I can’t remember how many of each. We are stumped. Did we use 10 characters, 12 characters or 14 characters? I can’t remember. It might be birthdates, but those seem to fail. It might be a combination of two birthdates with a word in the middle, but that too has failed.
I am stumped! That simple straightforward password is evading our memories. The security is working and new users are blocked.

–Jim Cumming,
Publisher