Ok, I am asking how many is too many accounts? I am so frustrated right now because it has taken me seven different attempts to access my gmail account to post to this blog. I did not realize I had two Gmail accounts so I kept trying to log in using my first (and I thought only) Gmail account to get into my blog on blogger. A waste of over 45 minutes when I could have spent my time spell-checking, editing and posting my blog entry. I truly felt like I was on a hamster wheel in the town of Aggravation, New Mexico. Inane error messages such as “that account does not exist” to “username and password do not match” to “reclaim your old blogger account” did not help. I wish it had said “Hey, not that Gmail account but the other one - you know, the one where you quickly created a gmail account to access something and promptly forgot about it.”
Personally, I try to keep track of five different email accounts.
2 Yahoo! Accounts: one I use to teach an email class and one I used to use as football team mom
1 Verizon email: this is my main email account for family
1 work email: use it at work
1 college email: Where all correspondence from my school ends up
All have different passwords. At work, we have easily over 40 usernames and passwords to provide online access for different sources such as the New York Times subscription to Interlibrary Loan to our new payroll system which forces us to change our password EVERY MONTH.
All these passwords and accounts cause needless confusion and eat up valuable work time. Currently I am researching using Meebo for our instant messaging “Chat with a Reference Librarian”. I needed to set up new 5 different messaging clients (AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, Jabber and ICQ) to test it out. No problem except that another librarian thought I had reset the AOL password and delayed replying to email questions over the weekend because she did not think she could use AOL. AOL blocks as spam all emails from our library so we have to answer patrons’ questions using a special AOL account.
I am going to answer my initial question. How many is too many? When you can not remember them all.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I think this is becoming an issue for more and more of us. When I switched to a new PC I ran into all sorts of problems because I lost my cookies for certain sites I use a lot, the main one being the Chronicle of Higher Education. I had no clue what my account or password was and it took days, many emails and phone calls to get it all worked out. I love these electronic tools but am often frightened by how dependent I am on them.
How many indeed! At work I have a binder full of usernames and passwords. A frequent request at work is, "I forgot my password, can you tell me what it is?" In addition, each subscription has a username and password. I make it a habit to write down the info and keep it in the binder, but without my binder and my cheat sheet I would never remember.
Post a Comment