misAdventures of Workmonkey 3.0

A few days ago, I received a shiny, brand-new, orange and blue Citi Diamond Rewards credit card. Every so often, I take advantage of the 0% APR offers that corrupt my mailbox, and this year, decided to give Citi the honors of charging me nothing to charge everything.

As I always do when receiving a new card, I immediately took a seat at my laptop to set-up online access to my account.

Once at the Citi site, I began navigating through the "New User Registration" process. Things went south immediately. I'm sure you're aware, the first step of any user registration process is to enter a user id. As it often is, my first choice for a user id was "manderson". Yes, I'm aware the odds of that id being available is about the same as Age one day coming over to my house totally blasted, but I always try nonetheless. As expected, upon submission, I was informed, in small red type (helvetica, i think) that "manderson is already taken. Please enter a different user id". I immediately went to my next choice: "mkanderson". While there are over 100 million "manderson's" in the world, there are only 3 million "mkanderson's", so sometimes I have more luck (by "sometimes", i actually mean i've been successful with it once in 10 years). Obviously, I was none too suprised when I was subsequently informed that "mkanderson" has also already been taken. None of this was suprising, so I quickly moved into the next realm of my names, where I usually find more luck: without hesitation, I typed in "workmonkey", and sat back confidently. Again, that fucking red type informed me I'd have to try again. I next tried "workmokey2". No luck.

Now things were getting interesting. I've rarely struck out with some variation of workmonkey. Just to test things out, I tried "workmonkey650". Taken! Unreal! Now, not only is my name of choice taken everywhere in the world, but there are now 650 workmonkeys in the world, too. I'm beyond unoriginal. I'm a walking cliche. I tried all known variations of monkey. I keyed in my fantasy football id - "snowmonkey". Taken. "Snowmonkies"? Taken. "Tiredmonkey"? Taken.

I had never, in ten years of internet usage, gone this far without success. I know the American population recently exceeded 300 million, but "tiredmonkey"? What the fuck?

After about a half hour of similiar astonishment, I remembered a "Sunday Morning in Bed" blog I had recently read about a possessed penguin that steals wedding rings. Thus, I was relieved to find that "hauntedpenguin" was available. I knew I had zero percent chance at remembering this, so I wrote it down for future use. In reality, it is the coolest user id i've ever had, so, despite the initial frustration, I feel I actually arrived at a better place than I had started.

Next, however, things took an even further step into the absurd.

I am, by now, quite familiar with the process of answering a security quesiton in the event you forget your user id or password. These security questions have been the same over the past five years or so. Usually, you are required to submit the name of your first pet, first car, or mother's maiden name -- anything the operator can ask if you have to call and confirm your identity. I'm not sure if hackers have figured out a way to get around these questions or not, but not only did Citi have me answer a total of three security questions, but the questions themselves were, to be polite, totally, fucking unanswerable.

For the first security question, I had a choice of a drop-down menu listing five questions. I scanned my choices .. and scanned again. What is this shit? The five questions were:

* What is your favorite restaurant?
* What was the last name of your kindergarten teacher?
* What was your mom's first ever job?
* What is your favorite movie?
* Where was your grandmother born?

Well, even though I was only on question one, I was already overwhelmed. First off, the favorite restaurant and movie questions are totally inappropriate, because the answers are ever-evolving. They are the type of questions you sit around a dinner table and debate with friends for hours. There is no definite answer. And besides, whatever answer I might give on that night, it would no dobut change within the week. That night, I'd think that my favorite restaurant was Jack in the Box. But in a month? It might be BLT Burger. Or Westway Diner. Who the fuck has an end-all, be-all favorite restaurant. And movie? I see a new one every fucking week. And that one is always my favorite. Everytime someone asks me that question, I give a different answer. So there was no way i'd remember the answer to that question if ever asked again.

The other three questions were simply unfair. My kindergarten teacher's last name? I don't even remember going to kindergarten. And if I did go, and had a teacher, why would i remember her last name? I hardly remember Age's last name, and I see him twice a week. I didn't know where either of my grandmas were born when they were still living, so I certainly don't know since they no longer are (as a side note, is grandmas the plural of grandma? or is it like deer, where the plural of deer is deer, and not deers? so the plural of grandma would be grandmas). And I can't even remember my first job, more or less my mother's.

Eventually, I decided on a favorite restaurant and instantly wrote it down, as I knew it'd be gone from my head in a moment.

The other two sets of questions I ultimately had to answer were equally baffling. Ultimately, I did some research to find out what my first-ever friend's first-ever poster purchase was (A Dale Murphy baseball montage) . Finally, I calculated the square root of my head. And as a bonus question, I determined the sex and weight of my as-yet unborn child.

Suffice to say, if anyone every breaks into my account, he deserves it, as he'd officially know more about my life than I do. Hell, if I met someone who could answer those questions, I'd love to meet him. I'd like to know some of the answers myself.

In the end, I've got to give it to Citi. They've created the ultimate - a security process so complex, that even the person who set up the account will never, ever be able to access it again.