Passwords

Are we the only ones that have to have a special computer file to hold our passwords? Tonight, we finished our taxes. Yay us, and yay to the nice refund that we'll be getting. I know, we should be trying to make it so we get that money throughout the year, but we LOVE getting a refund. We can't shake the feeling that New York has some tricks up it's sleeve. You should see all the extra pages of questions that Turbo Tax has to ask us since we live in New York.
Anyways, back to passwords. So, we have a standard password. It works most of the time. Every once in a while a new website will require that the password must start with a number instead of a letter, or that the first letter be capitalized, or that it be a certain number of digits long. Worse yet, is the "Security Questions". Consider:
First job? (Brett's first job, or Kristin's first job? First real job? Babysitting?)
Oldest sibling? (Mine or his?)
Where did you got married? (Bainbridge Island? Poulsbo? Kiana Lodge?)
High School Mascot? (With school name first? Mine or his?)
What do you do about these? It isn't a problem until you are trying to log into, say a college savings account for your kids to enter onto a tax form. You need it RIGHT NOW, and the darn password doesn't seem to be working. Is it case sensitive? Sometimes the program kindly offers to email it to you...but alas, somehow old email addresses get into the picture and that doesn't always work either.
We've always kept a huge spreadsheet (Brett's specialty) that has all this information. The spreadsheet is really, really scary, and I try to avoid it at all costs. And it doesn't really help with the new Security Questions that most sites seem to prefer. A new problem, now that both my kids have email addresses and blogs is that when I go log onto mine, if I'm not careful, I find I'm already logged into one of their sites.
Aargh. If it's any consolation, I find notebook pages already with my kids' passwords on them--some games require passwords, and they have to have codes to play with a friend, plus their email accounts which are new enough that they don't always remember them. I suspect they will have way more passwords to remember in their lifetime than we ever have.
Good luck getting your taxes finished everyone, especially Monica, who never even starts hers until the week of April 15.