The other day as I logged into my home mortgage company's website to make my mortgage payment (and the pity begins) I was asked to make some changes for security purposes. The company has added another level of security. This required me to do two things:
1. Choose a picture that has no significance to me, that supposedly will resonate with me for future logins and come up with some silly caption which they term a "catchphrase" to go a long with the picture.
2. Choose three security questions and answer them in case I need to reset my password.
The first was an easy accomplishment. I found myself mildly entertained by picking out a picture of some ugly version of a cow.. or was it an ox... something in that cow-ish species. I then of course picked a seemingly witty "catchphrase" to go along.
I then begin to browse the the security question options. Each of the three questions had a different set of choices to pick from. I felt like I was building a "How Well Do you Know Me?" quiz. Honestly, anyone who really knew me well would probably be able to answer all the security questions I chose... How that's secure? I'm not quite sure. I digresss...
As I scrolled through each set of questions trying to figure out whicih ones to choose, I realized there were a couple of questions in each set that I could not answer. The questions were:
- What is the first name of your paternal grandfather?
- What is the first name of your maternal grandmother?
- What is the first name of your maternal grandfather?
- What is the first ame of your paternal grand mother?
All the questions have a common theme: grandparent's names.
I couldn't believe it. I guess I always knew this... but I never realized it or paid much attention, but I don't know the first name of any of my grandparents! I think my paternal grandmother's name is Maria... or was it Isabel... ? How pathetic is that? I think it comes in somewhere between "I graduated from college and am a supervisor at McDonald's" and "I'm 40 and have never lived outside my parents home" on the pathetic list. Not only is it pathetic, it's sad. I guess that's what comes with having grandparents that you don't remember meeting* and that don't speak the same language as you. But still...
I'm gonna go crawl into a hole now....
* I'm paternal grandparents live/d (grandfather passed while I was in 4th grade) and though I actually lived there for about a month when I was only a few months old, I obviously don't remember them.
