"What is it? What is it? Is it the combination of my ex-girlfriend’s name and the capital of Iceland or is it the capital of Iceland and the rarest reptile in the Amazon, or...?"

Open Sesame…?

This business about passwords – including number combinations, cute or wildly imaginative names, phrases, or those from the grab-the-first-one-you-can-think-of school of thought – it’s all getting too much.

You have to remember so much stuff to merely get at what is yours, burdened as you ­already are by all those identification numbers assigned to you by scary, but crucial, authorities.

Being human, and therefore ­addicted to ignoring those fast-becoming-hoarse little voices of common sense within, you cannot resist the obscure and the over-complicated.

And a quaint conceit that you are important enough to have a whole bunch of foreign and local agents/officials desperate to de-code their way into your possessions creates further complications.

(To be fair, though, sometimes those “eight digits only” conditions are tough, requiring some innovative hoopla with dots and dashes.)

Nothing creates a greater sense of baffled frustration than being ‘locked out’ of your own ‘property’, thanks to overestimating your own cleverness – and your memory’s staying power.

Passwords reflect personalities… the play-it-safe birthday-date types, or the crazily unpredictable… who could end up staring at computer screens, unable to access their mail, and having to embarrassedly click loudly for ‘Help’.

Locked out of your own suitcase?

Who asked you not to stick to the good old ‘000’?