In which we discuss passwords, usernames, and recycling

all of which are a pain the nether regions.

Staples will not sell me anything unless I sign up and register. My money is no good if they don't know who I am, I guess. Do they think I am a spammer, wasting their prescious bandwidth, instead of a customer seeking printer cartridges?

Unfortunately, I only want printer cartridges once in a while, and I always forget my username and password between orders. They must put a cookie on my site, but I guess it expires between cartridges, which I order infrequently. I don't like to print anything because I don't want to use up my cartridges so I don't feel guilty when I conceal the used ones in the trash, instead of recycling them. I don't like feeling guilty, but I really, really dislike keeping a bunch of trash until I have time to go to the recycling center. The Charm home is not a substation of Delaware Recycles. We like to get rid of stuff we don't want here, so we can buy more stuff we don't need and have a place to keep it until we need to recycle it (or conceal it in the trash).

When we lived in New Jersey, we used to recycle newspapers and other paper stuff. Some agency for reformed drug addicts picked it up and sold it for a pittance. This worked fine until New York City came onstream with their paper recycling, when the bottom dropped out of the paper market, and it became more expensive to recycle it than to dump it. The agency then refused to have their clients pick up the stuff; addicts or not, they were able to do the math.

Did this stop the city from having separate pickups for paper? Nosiree. They had special trucks which picked it up on a different schedule than the other garbage and then dumped it in the very same landfill. This cost the taxpayer extra but it made the politicians feel virtuous, and in New Jersey that is no little matter.

But I digress. Passwords. Usernames. Yes, back to the subject at hand. I wouldn't mind having usernames and passwords if I could use the same one all the time. But different sites have different requirements. Some demand at least 6 characters. some demand a combination of numbers and letters. Some need to know if your belly button is an innie or an outie. The computer is able to remember some of this garbage but not all of it.

What to do, what to do? I actually started to write this stuff down on a piece of paper. But I lost the piece of paper.