Margin Call: No password required

The hot little phone was fresh out of the box, all charged and ready to go. All it needed to be activated was the okay from the phone company.
Twenty minutes of twisting through the call center maze, straining to listen over a trans-Atlantic cable that connected me to a representative in a remote land, and finally everything was ready. All she needed was my account number.
That’s my phone number, right?
No, this is a six to 10 digit number.
Then it must be the code I set up a few weeks ago so I could read my bill online.
No, that code has letters, this is only numbers.
The account number. Let me think … It’s printed on the monthly bill! Hold on while I dig it out and read it.
That’s not it either.
Can you give me a clue, here? I’m running out of ideas.
There is a back-up question. What is your first pet’s name?
First pet. Hmmm. How about Ziggy?
Wrong. You don’t even know your own pet’s name?
I grew up on a farm and unlike you city folks, we had lots of pets. Dogs were in and out through a revolving door. Cats came and went, most of which didn’t even have names. Then there were the horses. The occasional bucket calf. Don’t forget the sheep from my FFA project. I adored them all. But remembering which pet was the first, now that’s hard to do. What does this have to do with turning on my phone, any way?
Everything. Without that code, you can’t use this phone you paid good money for.
Frustrated and phoneless, I spent the night resurrecting painful memories of every cat that ate rat poison and every dog that chased cars until the one that didn’t get away, trying to remember which one I’d deemed worthy of holding the key that would unlock the fanciest gadget I’d ever owned.
Not a clue.
Digging through the old e-mail file — I knew there was a reason I kept 4,000 messages — I found not only the long lost pet, but the actual six to 10 digit number.
The next morning I was back in business. Then began the process of setting up the phone, which required even more logins and passwords.
More and more businesses is transacted online, which is usually convenient, except for all the passwords required to access your own information. A quick count revealed 22 top-secret passwords that I use on a regular basis. How do I keep track of all this? Like most of you, I imagine, it’s all scrawled down on a piece of scratch paper in the desk drawer.
Just added to the list: the name of one not-quite-forgotten pet.
Business editor Susan Mires can be reached
at susanm@npgco.com or (816) 271-8560.