Passwords

We are a full house.

Our tall thin house is stuffed to the seams with people and dogs.

It is not as full as it has been at times in the past, there have been happy days when all of our offspring have been under this roof all together, but it feels very full all the same, perhaps because they have become rather larger in recent years.

Ritalin Boy came this morning, and is now in the loft, where he has settled down with Oliver’s PlayStation to listen to bad language and engage with paedophiles.

This has in fact occupied an unexpectedly large part of the day. Oliver has not used his PlayStation for ages, and when he came to switch it on this morning we discovered that he could not log in.

He could not remember any of his log-in details, which did not help. We tried the ones that we had written down, but they did not work.

Further investigation, which I can jolly well tell you took ages, led us to uncover that his account had been hacked, his user name changed, and somebody else was using it. They were talking to lots of foreign paedophiles in an incomprehensible language, which might have been Chinese.

Oliver’s bank details are linked to the account, but nobody had used them to purchase anything. They had just been playing games on his account.

I thought this was a very wasted opportunity on behalf of the hacker, fancy being as computer-literate as that and just using your astounding skills to play Grand Theft Auto Deluxe Edition on the cheap.

Crossly, Oliver signed them out. I telephoned Sony, and then spent some time ploughing my way through the complexities of the various options available on their automatic telephone answering machine.

Sony turned out to be an unexpectedly English gentleman, who managed to be brilliantly efficient whilst giving the impression that I was a tiresome nuisance who ought to have paid better attention to the reams of useful anti-hacking advice issued by Sony in small print on the bottom of their website, and which could be helpfully summarised as: we don’t care.

In the end, in a helpful move which we all thought was very clever indeed, the gentleman took the serial number of his PlayStation and stopped anybody using the account from any other Playstation anywhere else. Then they dismembered his bank details and restored his username, and hung up, with an air of heard-it-all-before weariness.

Oliver and Ritalin Boy retired to the loft to shoot zombies and watch unsuitably violent things, and I carried on with the computing theme by trying to download the telephone banking application on to both Oliver’s and Mark’s telephones.

This would not work either.

Apple flatly denied all knowledge of either of them.

It is one of the very difficult things about doing anything online. You are told, along with all sorts of dreadful warnings, not to use the same memorable password for more than one thing, and better still, to use the string of random letters and numbers that Apple has suggested.

On the few occasions I have done this, Apple has promptly tucked the combination away in a secret drawer with instructions that it can only be opened as the light of the full moon falls on the keyhole at midnight on Durin’s Day, leaving me fruitlessly shouting abuse at the computer and unable to buy anything on my eBay account for ever afterwards.

Hence I tend to have a few passwords that I use for everything, and write them down in my own secret drawer, where they cannot be read by a hacker in Nigeria.

You are not supposed to do this, and every now and again my computer lectures me, sternly, about such foolhardiness.

I spent two whole hours trying password combinations, not even to access the bank, but so that Apple would let me into its online Application shop. Suddenly and unexpectedly, it gave way, and let me in with the very password and username combination that I had tried twenty times already, by which time I was practically frothing at the mouth with frustration.

I retired downstairs for a soothing cup of tea.

I am restored to good spirits now, having had a happy afternoon doing quiet non-computer-related things.

I fed Ritalin Boy pizza for tea, and he said, scornfully, that it was for the fourth day on the run, and he thought that the adults in his life should have more imagination.

I explained that I could not have less interest in catering for people who do not eat nice things, like smoked trout or olives or pecan nuts and said that if he wanted variation I could take the pepperoni off the top.

He declined this.

When I read his bedtime story I was shocked by the liberal use of exclamation marks and capital letters, and general lack of grammatical understanding that seems to be suffered by children’s authors these days. It is no wonder that we are rearing a nation of idiots. If that is the sort of stuff being taught in school then I might have a mild increase in sympathy for the current Government policy of not allowing them to go.

I imagine it is to prepare them for careers in dreaming up computer passwords.

He is in bed.

They are all in bed.

I think I shall follow.

I have not taken a picture. Have a picture of some flowers.