Swiss cheese brain

I'm embarrassed to admit that my brain is made of Swiss cheese. I've forgotten more things in the past week than I remember about my entire life. And as a result of that, I've spent hours on the phone to no less than five different customer service departments, trying to get passwords reset so I can log into the myriad web sites I use to keep our business going. At last count, I have to log on to about 350,000different web sites to track account balances, issue payments, receive payments, input invoices, shop for office supplies, book Tony's facials, and the list goes on.

Over the past five business days, I've had to call for passwords from the bank, my student loan provider, a third-party payment site and Office Depot. In fact, I just got off the phone with a lovely young lady who is in the customer service department for our credit card processing company who informed me that not only was I entering the wrong information, but I was ON THE WRONG WEB SITE. I could hear her gesticulating wildly for her fellow call-center employees to click over and listen to the nutter who just called in and didn't even know which web site she was supposed to use. Awesome.

I have no idea at what point in my life my brain died, but I know it was recently. Part of the problem is that I have a lot to do every day now for the first time in nearly a year. I suppose there is some mental muscle atrophy after an extensive period of disuse. Watching Tabatha's Salon Takeover all day can only use so many brain cells, and it probably kills about three times that many. Working back up to full mental capacity must take some time. I'm guessing that by the time I retire, I'll have my faculties back.

The other problem is that every site has different password requirements. Here you have to enter a password with letters and numbers. Over here, a password has to have capital AND lowercase letters and numbers. At this third place, capital, lowercase, numbers AND be longer than 12 characters. Another place, capital, lowercase, numbers, umlauts, Cyrillic characters, punctuation and a hat. It becomes impossible to come up with something that anyone could remember. Let alone a woman with mush for a brain.

So, I make embarrassing phone calls to bored CSRs in foreign countries and throw myself on their mercy. Only one has had the bad form to laugh at me, and he laughed for what seemed like 15 minutes at my admission of being unable to log into a web site I hadn't used in three months. (He was from the South, so at least his laughing had a pleasing, gentle accent.) Everyone else has just seemed mildly irritated with my ineptitude.

But I've started solving the problem. I'm using miniature Post-It notes (Hey, I thought they were adult-sized when I ordered them from Office Depot. How was I supposed to know they were Lilliputian?) and sticking them in a secret place on my desk with all my user names and passwords written down.

The only problem now is finding a secret place in my desk large enough for 450 tiny Post-its.