I’m A Weak Password, And I Just Don’t Have It In Me To Get Stronger

Emily Kapp & Daniel Stillman
Slackjaw
Published in
3 min readJun 5, 2022
Freepik.com

Look at you, you’ve got somewhere to go but there’s something stopping you from entering this exclusive website. And you need your wingman, your old trusty friend. The password. But I have bad news, I’m not the password I was and our journey together might end today. I’m a weak password and despite my best efforts to get where you need to go…I just don’t have it in me to be the password you want me to be.

Don’t get me wrong, I was considered strong back in my day. No teenage hacker or scary man sitting in a dark room with a large computer could touch me. I was unpredictable, I was a word that you didn’t even know could exist. At one point in history, no one had the talent, and frankly, the guts to even pronounce my name, “password.’ And those who even dared to say my name would face my wrath because passwords too, believe in the motto of snitches get stitches. This is all to say, the truth before language started getting complicated with things like exclamation points, question marks, and something called a hashtag?

But I hate to admit it, I was starting to let myself go. I got way too cocky. It was foolish of me to think that millions of people wouldn’t guess that my name is “password”! But I’m now starting to regret all those Internet cookies I ate. All those times when the websites urged me to change, I refused. I was so confident in who I was, I thought no one could touch me. But alas, all my bad decisions caught up to me. I was making myself more susceptible and was diagnosed with cyber incontinence, the condition where you have to wear a diaper to clean up data leaks. I was a shadow of who I was and didn’t recognize the password on the screen.

And it wasn’t just myself that I was no longer able to recognize, it was my competition, too. You would think they were created by super-human robots the way they could guard any account from Russian hackers. I was simply no match against my strong, good, and even fair counterparts anymore. And in this ever-evolving password game of survival of the fittest, the strong outlive the weak. My weak password, “login” falls to its knees against “yvwQQktIx9Jogzap.” The once always reliable “12345” is getting gut sucker-punched repeatedly by the hefty and intimidating “zkmifFsItyQC2NIC.” And your password that’s just your name, “amy”? She’s outside getting shot with a machine gun by “4oLL9mWQILuRKMaR” as we speak.

What I’m trying to say is, I’m tired. There are only so many times you can be deleted and expected to type back up. Weak passwords are never going to win. When you compare us weak passwords to those strong passwords, it’s like comparing the cheer captain to the girl in the bleachers. There’s no fight, and there’s no fight left in me. It’s time to pack up, it’s time to say goodbye. “Goodbye”…huh. That would be a good password….rolls off the tongue…easy to remember…all lowercase, of course, yes…do I still have a lot of fight left in me? Is “weak” just a label?

At this point in time, you must make an important decision. A choice of laziness, or Internet safety. You either choose the path of a weak password that’s the name of your dog with a 1 after it, a noble path, or you choose the path of a robotic, cold, but strong password. It’s love vs. power. What do you want to choose? Oh, I’m seeing now that it’s mandatory for you to have a strong password for you to create an account with Club Penguin. I see. Well, I guess I’ll go now. I’ll never forget you, Amy. Farewell.

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Emily Kapp & Daniel Stillman
Slackjaw

Emily Kapp and Daniel Stillman are both Chicago-based humor writers. You can contact them at kappstillmansatire@gmail.com.