Please enter username and password

reasonably safeguard your User Name and Password;
not allow someone to observe you entering your User Name and Password;
not disclose or allow your User Name or Password to become known to anyone else (including family or those in apparent authority such as the Police, or ####Financial Services staff);
not write them down, record or store them anywhere in written or electronic form, including in a file on your computer or in any password saving facility .
reasonably safeguard your User Name and Password;
choose a User Name and Password that are unique and not the same as or similar to User Names or Passwords used for any other services you may use, including non financial services.
If you believe for any reason that your User Name and/or Password could be known by someone else, or if you discover any unauthorised use of your User Name and/or Password has taken place, you must change your User Name and/or Password immediately, then call us ...

On the face of it all that sounds very reasonable - for a store credit card.

The problem is that near identical conditions apply for the power bill, the phone bill, the gas bill, internet banking, trademe, email, MSN, SMF, Pet forum, Knitter's forum, Blogger, online magazine subscriptions, job seeking websites, any big company who lists vacancies on their own websites, NZ Herald "have you say", the local library, photobucket, every single online shopping site... the list goes on.

Not all of them require both upper and lower case and not all of them require a number or two in the user name or the password. All of them however are very clear on one point. DO NOT WRITE DOWN YOUR PASSWORD OR USER NAME.

That is all very fine and dandy but if you use different names and passwords as you are supposed to how the hell to you remember them all?
There are 18 in that list for a start.

Even doubling up and using the same password for several sites doesn't help when several sites helpfully allocate a user name for you. You still have to remember which password goes with what.

Then there is the joint account problem. Do you give your partner access to your online magazine subsciption? If it was a paper copy you would just pass it over or leave it on the coffee table.

How about internet banking for joint accounts, does your partner need their own log in?

What triggered this rant?

The Secretary needs to pay the phone bill. The account is in He Who Earns name and he set up the account. She can't remember the username or password because she didn't set them. He doesn't pay the bills so he can't remember them either. Better still she can't fix the matter via phone during office hours because it is his account and he is too busy working to hang around on hold to sort it out.