Who on Earth Comes Up with These Questions?

Photo by Camylla Battani on Unsplash

A good-humored treatise on website security questions

It first came up because I was barking about how a certain national credit union, where I’ve been struggling to open a functioning business account, had required me to set up a series of security questions.

With huge thanks to my Black friends the very first things I noticed about the questions were that:

1. They HAD to have been written by a middle-class White guy and
2. They were racist AF, but also ageist, and every other kind of -ist. Which was just funny.
3. I had not had most, if not all, of the experiences that they were asking me to use as security questions. That meant I’d have to make up answers. Which I might or might not remember in a pinch. I’ll come back to that in a sec.

Had I had a “normal, typical” White chick life I’d have easily been able to answer any and all of those questions, but I didn’t. I don’t know my folks’ wedding anniversary, didn’t have a wedding reception, never had kids, didn’t have a friend in high school (I dropped out and finished on my own), I could go on. The list was long, and I stared at it in frustration while on the phone with the digital team of said credit union.