And so...it begins.

a reply to: TrueBrit

Hey TB: Good luck to you! You can use a bunch of simple tricks or codes to remember number combinations and accts. My phone and computers have my passwords backwards, one letter-number to the right or left or both...off of the original.

Got a copy in my wallet too. Someone gets a hold of them...they havent a clue of what anything means or how to break the forms.

I learned this from my father 40 years ago. A pharmacist...he would keep drug codes in Latin and backwards and every other way thinkable...and write down and save how to read them...without labeling it. But HE knew.

Again...good luck!

BEst, MS

a reply to: AboveBoard

I have a really lovely book keeper and an accountant. I have a handle on purchasing, selling, getting receipts, crap like that. Most things handle themselves where that sort of stuff is concerned. I have a drawer for things I have bought, bills that come in, all that sort of thing. Get a chit, stuff it in there in date order, pull it out for reference when necessary, blah de blah.

That's simple. I even have a ledger book for all my sales, laid out the way I like so that even the change can be checked at the end of the day, that's fine. Remembering dates to pay on, PIN to pay with, even remembering to add information to the calendar on my phone the moment that data is recieved... That I CANNOT achieve worth a CRAP.

Imagine for a a moment, that you are me. You have a toolbag in your hand, filled to bursting with chisels, lock by pass tools, screwdrivers, flashlight, measuring tape, spare locks, fixings... You turn up to a simple job, should take no more than seconds, SECONDS to complete, like breathing in and out, like letting out a burp after a beer. Zero effort required.

You lift your hand to your bag to get the tool you need, but before you reach it, you forget which tool to use, when to use it, how to use it, why you are even there, the universe as a metaphor for the psyche, collapses in on itself, leaving a void. I have no control over it, I have been fighting crap like that for all my life. Except, of course, the work, the actual work is something I thrive on, that I can actually do well without that void creeping up on me and destroying my momentum. The hard bit is the bit I can do. The parts I fail at are the easy bits, and I have no control at all over when my mind will dump itself out like the contents of a ruptured abdomen. The problem is me, my brain, the way it works, and the way it does not.

At the moment, I feel like the best I can do, which I will keep doing if it kills me, is to stumble from calamity to cataclysm like a halfwit and hope for the best.

a reply to: TrueBrit

Hm. I guess I misunderstood what you were asking... Sorry! (blushes) I apologize for the extremely long off-topic post!

Memory stuff - that is a challenge. I understand. I have "name blanks" or "pin number blanks" sometimes myself. The worst is when I run into someone that I KNOW I KNOW and I can't remember their name to save my life.

Best wishes on everything!

a reply to: AboveBoard

Oh do not apologise AB!

I am hardly in a state to be explaining myself very well. I pretty much buggered everything up in the last half hour of the day today, and it's set me all askew, otherwise I would have been clearer about what was going on.

I think at least half my problem is, that people expect, because of the way I deal with matters intellectually, that I must be a very capable man, when it comes to planning, organising, dates, times, figures.... the reality is, that I have become fantastically capable of many things, but none of them are useful things to a person in business. I am learning that skills are irrelevant, service is irrelevant, determination is meaningless. Only the things that I am somehow neurologically incapable of, have any importance in business.

I was never meant to be anything but a grafter and a thinker, never meant to live in an age where anything more than that was ever necessary. Time will tell, I suppose.

a reply to: TrueBrit

I don't know if this will help. I've also struggled with the issue of all these numbers and passwords and such. Unlike you (apparently) I have an affinity for numbers, and so survived for a long time with the crap stuffed into a side bin out of the way in my head.

It got to be too much. For a while I had a wee book that NEVER left home with all the stuff. Then it got lost. No. I lost it.

what is the solution? Well, I survived 50 years without a phone in my pocket, but for some reason, in the next 8 years, I needed one. I have destroyed several phones. I have never lost one. Because I'm a semi-paranoid person, I keep all my phones locked with a code necessary to open it.

Now here's the thing. I just have to remember ONE password. I keep all the rest of them -- and they are more than a few -- in the phone. I've backed up the passwords onto a zip drive which is kept in our safe. My password for my phone is a chemical formula. It used to be Avogadro's number.

It's not that I'm important, because I'm not, or that my stuff is so super-secret. I'm distrusting of password generator services because I'm a moonbat. I think this might work for you, because you're sort of a moonbat also, albeit a really smart one. Store your passwords and codes on a flash drive and hide it really well. Put them on your phone and use a lock. It's a pain in the ass at first, to be frank with you, but after a week, it becomes old hat and you'll hardly notice having to key into the phone to get your stuff.