In a Word: Security

With a deep bow to Lore Sjoberg's One Word comics, here's what I hope is a recurring feature on what I hope will be a continuing blog.

Security

Today, I got a call telling me that I needed to pay my car payment.  Money's been tight, so I had been putting it off.  The woman on the phone was sympathetic, even friendly, until the time came to end the call.  "So when will you be making a payment?  Will it be today?  I can take a payment right now, if you'd like . . ."

I declined.  I don't like making payments over the phone.  I told her I could just log in to the website and pay it, like I do every month. 

Would that were the case.

I opened the leaseholder's website and put in my login.  It kicked back an error -- either my login or password was wrong.  Then I remembered that for increased security, they had made me change my login from a gmail address to a unique login name. 

I chose, of course, a login that I use for at least four other sites.  It's just easier to remember that way.

They also insisted I make a new password that would be longer and harder for a bot to brute force.

I chose, of course, a password I use for at least four other sites.  It's just easier to remember that way.

My memory jogged, I put in the correct login and password.  Then, for added security, the site fed me a question I had, apparently, answered at some point:  "what's your favorite TV show?"

What is my favorite TV show?  What was my favorite show a month ago, when I put in the answer?  Was it the X-Files, a rediscovered gem?  Star Trek: The Next Generation?  Buffy the Vampire Slayer?  Did I capitalize, or did I think it'd be easier to remember it was all lower-case?  Why didn't they serve up the question about what model my first car was?  At least I could have looked that up online.

After several attempts to read my own mind, I was locked out of the account.  For my security, I had to re-enter my account number to get back in.  The account number that's on all of the paper bills I don't get since I switched to paperless billing.

So I called the help number again.  After several prompts to enter my account number, I banged on 0 until the computer hung up on me.  I called back and played along until I got a person.

Like the woman who called to urge me to pay the bill, this woman was friendly and sympathetic, until I asked her to give me my account number.

"We cannot give out that information over the phone, for security purposes.  I can mail the number to you."

"Can't you just send it to my email?"

"No. We are unable to send email outside our intranet. Do you have a fax machine?"

"No, I do not, because this is not 1975, it's 2010.  Please transfer me to someone who can help me."

So she kicked me up the call-center ladder one rung.  The next lady was a little less polite to start, and even quicker to shut me down.  She would be happy to mail or fax the number, but absolutely could not give it over the phone or email. 

"Why won't you let me give you money?  I'm trying so hard to give you money.  I really don't care if someone else gets my account number and pays my car payment for me.  Let's do this."

No dice.  I demanded to be kicked up another rung in the responsibility ladder.  She said she'd happily transfer me to someone else who would tell me 'no.'

While I waited on hold, I went to a fax-to-email service online.  I gave them a credit card for a free trial, and they generated a junk phone number that could receive faxes and email them to me.  When I spoke to the next woman, I grumbled about archaic technology, suggested she send it by carrier pigeon, and finally gave her the fax number.

Minutes later, the fax showed up -- as a PDF file in my email.

Here's how tight the car company's security is:  in order to get my super-sekrit account number, I gave them the last four digits of my social security number (easy enough to find online), my home address (ditto), and a random fax number.  Rather than sending an email to the address they had on file that was associated with the account, they sent a fax out blind to a number that, for all they knew, was in Leroy's Den of Money Laundering and Thievery.  It was none of their doing that the fax went where it was supposed to -- my freakin' email.



I've decided that any organization that insists on using a fax machine gets the same double-barreled red-eyed rage usually reserved for companies that don't take credit cards, and people who insist on writing checks for groceries.  This is outdated technology that has been replaced by something easier and better, and was replaced over a decade ago.

For my security, next time just text it to my phone, okay?

New Look, New Thoughts.

So I figured it's about time I stopped wasting hours refreshing metafilter and boingboing, and spent a little more time writing on my own blog.  Which meant a long-overdue facelift. 

This blog will now focus on my curmudgeonly rants about politics and pop culture, my observations of human behavior, and the occasional adorable story about my adorable child.

Hopefully, it will also go on longer than a couple of posts before I taper off again.

Fun With Anachronisms!

Today I went to a Hollywood Video for the first time in at least two years. Since technology's gotten better at delivering streaming video or downloaded video, it just seemed like too much work to go to a video store. If I couldn't get it on Netflix, Netflix streaming, or certain illicit methods, I just didn't watch it. But today, we needed a movie for Jess to watch for a class tonight, and all of my legit and less legit methods failed. So, the video store.

Walking through those shelves of poorly-alphabetized DVDs was like going back in time. I got hit by little snippets of memory and blasts of nostalgia: renting R-rated foreign films as a teenager, hoping for nudity; running through the video store with Jess while we were in college, picking three dumb movies and watching all of them in a night; picking a movie with three or four friends, bickering and laughing until we settled on something we'd all seen before. Just being in there made me happy. I grabbed the movie we needed, chatted with the clerk, checked some release dates, and walked out.

There's something about that whole transaction that's inherently more satisfying for me than dowloading or streaming a movie. For one thing, there's a finite set of films in a video store. Sometimes, limited selection is the only thing that gets me moving -- usually, Jess and I decide to watch a movie, then we spend an hour looking through Netflix's streaming selections, and then it's too late to watch a movie.

So a limited selection actually helps, and so does the physical arrangement of movies on a shelf. The DVD art can catch your attention, make you pause and consider something you might not have heard of. You can also just wander the aisles, just browsing, letting your eyes fall where they may, surrounded by hundreds of DVDs just waiting to entertain you.

Sure, I can browse movies online, and can even see tiny pictures of the box cover. But it hits my eyes the same way all information does these days -- with me sitting on my ass, perched over my laptop or lounging in front of the desktop computer. That time spent doing a physical version of something I usually do online, and how happy the simple chore made me, illustrated that my other four senses are starving for input.

Maybe we need some physical transactions and human interactions in the world, after all. Maybe it's not a good thing to have every movie ever made available at our fingertips. Maybe there ought to be a place in the world for the video store. I suppose video stores are doomed, but after today, I'll be sad to see them go.

What's "enough?"

Tonight, my son fell asleep downstairs while we were watching a movie. I watched him sleep for a while, and felt a little choked up. Nothing new there -- seeing him so helpless, so beautiful, so wonderful, it usually makes me a little emotional.

But then I picked him up and carried him upstairs, and I thought to myself, 'wow, he's getting heavy.' And then I wondered how much longer I'd be able to hold him. And I began to cry. This is the flip side of the joy of watching him turn into a person. Every day, there's more there there; he can crawl! He can stand up! He can almost talk! But that other side is that every day, we mourn a little the baby he was yesterday. We love him and only love him more and more, but we'll never see that baby again. That's the joy and that's the tragedy.

And then I thought -- and here's where the tears really came full force -- "did I hold him enough when he was small enough to hold?" And the answer, of course, of course, is 'no.' Not even if I clasped him to my chest non-stop day and night. And I didn't, of course -- I had websites to look at and meals to cook and movies to watch. We should always and ever spend more time with those we love, but we can never spend enough time, and that is another joy and another tragedy.

I could never, ever hold him enough for me. I could never love him enough for me. And I realize that this pain is not the barest tip of a very, very long knife, and I am afraid and amazed. I think of my mother and father, and I know they wonder if they held me enough, if they loved me enough. And they probably feel like they didn't -- how could they? But you did, mom and dad, you did, and I hope I can, too.

This is learning how to celebrate and mourn, to love a hurt that will only hurt deeper with time. This is learning to sing while your heart bleeds.

Is it enough? It never will be, and always has to be.

Only human . . .

Here's another one of those weird thoughts I have from time to time.

Ollie is a little person. We call him an angel, our golden boy, perfect baby, but the truth is, he's just a person. I'm not demeaning him by thinking of him that way -- quite to the contrary. It's actually better for me, Jess, and him if we don't idealize him or our family dynamic.

This morning, Ollie woke us up at 4:00 a.m. to eat. He did this because he didn't eat enough last night before bed, and then he woke us again at 6 to eat, and wouldn't eat more than a couple of mouthfuls before becoming disinterested. Now, our primary impulse is dismay: "Why is our perfect angel doing this? Why is our perfect baby acting this way? What's wrong with him? What's wrong with us for being kind of annoyed at the lack of sleep? What kind of monsters are we to be annoyed with our angel?"

But if you think of him as a little person, that perspective changes. He's a human being. He has needs, and wants, but sometimes, he's just going to be a jerk. That's the way people are. And so long as we don't shout at him, or display our annoyance, it's okay to be annoyed when a person is being a jerk. It doesn't mean we love him any less -- it just means we could have done with a little more sleep.

Loving someone unconditionally doesn't mean you're blind to their flaws. In fact, I don't think you can really love someone all the way if you *are* blind to their flaws, because then you don't really know them well enough for love that strong.

I guess we ought to get used to the "wanting to hug and strangle at the same time" kind of love. I mean, soon he's going to be a terrible two's toddler, and a teenager, and a grown man telling his dad, "you're wrong about everything." Best get used to the idea that he's his own person, and sometimes his desires are going to run absolutely contrary to our own, but that we won't love him any less for it.

You Did This To Me!

Some day, Ollie will be a teenager. He'll want to stay up until 3 a.m. partying with his friends and sleep until noon. He'll wonder why Mom and Dad insist on going to bed before midnight most nights, and why they get up at 6 or 7 even on the weekends. What kind of strange people are these? Don't they know that all the fun stuff happens at night?

And we'll try and tell him that we used to be exactly the same way. We'll talk about those nights where we didn't notice it was late until the sun came up, and the days we rolled out of bed groggy to have breakfast at noon. But then we had a baby.

That baby was an awesome baby, and he slept through the night, which meant he went to bed around 9 or 10 and got up at 6 or 7. No matter when Mom and Dad went to bed, he got up at the same time, so they started adjusting to his sleep schedule. They found that when they got up early, they got to spend more time playing with him and having fun -- that the morning was actually good for something. Since most of their friends were having babies, too, most of the fun stuff quit happening before midnight.

So the answer to "why are Mom and Dad so lame?" is "you trained us to be this way."

Somehow, I don't think he'll get it, though. After all, it took me fifteen years to understand it :-).

Life in the Kinetoscope. . .

So a few people have said, "your blog for Ollie is great, but we want to know what you think about being a parent, not just what he thinks about being a baby." I've resisted posting my thoughts, just because I was afraid they weren't new or insightful. Y'know, "my baby's cute," "I love him," not exactly ground-breaking material.

But, I do see the value in recording some of these thoughts, if not for posterity, then for myself. What's life with Ollie like?

While I know it's a radical departure and a complete change in every aspect of my life, it doesn't really feel that way. It feels more like another puzzle piece slipping into place, rather than a boulder dropped in a lake. It's the same way I felt when Jess moved in, or when we moved to Minneapolis -- there's this process of turning my life into what it's supposed to be, not giving up what it was. Caring for Ollie is sometimes easy, sometimes hard, but it always feels exactly right. Like there *should* be challenges in my life, there *should* be responsibilities, and frustrations, there *should* be this purpose. Jess filled a void that I didn't know was there until I met her, and so did Ollie -- he made one more set of restless, empty feelings go away.

That's probably why for the most part I don't reflect on the ongoing miracle of him. It's not often that I step back and go, "this is my son. He has half of my DNA. He went from an embryo to this little person who can almost stand up and talk. This is part of me, and part of Jess, and yet totally his own person." When I do think that, it blows my mind, of course, but for the most part I'm just enjoying his company.

There are rare moments when the whole truth of the matter threatens to burst forth and make me dissolve into happy tears, though. Last night, Jess read Ollie a few books and got him sufficiently sleepy that it was time to put him to bed. I cradled him in my arms and sang him a lullaby that my grandmother used to sing to me. It goes, "close your sleepy eyes, my little buckaroo, while the light of western skies is shining down on you . . ." When I hit the next verse, a lump rose in my throat and my eyes filled with tears: "don't you realize, my little buckaroo, that t'was from the little acorn that the oak tree grew / and remember that your dad was once a kid like you . . ."

I had a brief flash of my father, about my age, holding me in his arms and singing that song. Then of his father, about my age, holding my infant father in his arms and singing. Then flash forward to Ollie, 25 years old, holding his baby son and feeling that same connection to all the fathers and sons that came before him. It made me think of a kinetoscope, an ever-repeating loop -- the father cradles the son, the son grows up and become a father who cradles his son.

Now I can see that a father is not some different kind of person -- a different species, like I thought when I was a kid. A father is no more or less than a son, imbued with no special knowledge save that he has become part of that recursive loop, doing his best to transmit the earth-shaking love he feels by rocking his son to sleep.

And remember that your dad is still a kid like you . . .